‘True Detective: Night Country’ Director Issa López Discusses Politics In Horror
Mary Beth McAndrews
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Since the release of her 2017 horror film Tigers Are Not Afraid, director Issa López has established herself as a crucial voice in the horror genre. She not only has an eye for the horrific but understands how to meld a poignant message with the horror to create deeply affecting works that linger long after the credits roll. López channels that skill again into True Detective: Night Country, where she serves as director and writer for all eight episodes.
So how exactly do you navigate both terrifying audiences while sharing an important political message?
“I am a really political person is who I am, but I’m also a geek and I love a good story. You can do both and be truthful to both as long as you tell a really good story,” López said. “You can put whatever beliefs you have in it if the story will sustain anybody that believes in what you believe or doesn’t. As long as the story is powerful enough.”
She continued, saying, “What I don’t believe in is stuffing a message on something that is not organically part of it.”
When it came to True Detective: Night Country, López started with a location. From that location came the realization of the themes she’d need to tackle in the series.
“I didn’t set out with the intention of talking about these themes, but as I understood that I wanted this to happen in the Arctic and the one part of America that has Arctic is Alaska,” said López. “The one part of Alaska that has the long night has a 70% population that is Inuit. I was never going to not represent that reality and any story that I was going to set, there had to be their story in part.”
Even more importantly for López, this season of True Detective needed to make sure that its Indigenous characters played active roles throughout the entire series.
“It couldn’t be about people coming from the outside to solve the situation while they just play the passive characters or the background,” she said. “They had to be active in the issue and in solving it.”
Enter Kali Reis, who plays opposite Jodie Foster’s Liz Danvers as Detective Evangeline Navarro. While Reis is not Inuit, she is an Indigenous woman, which is why this series and the issues of missing Indigenous women are so close to her heart.
“[With] a big production like this, you have eyes on it that wouldn’t normally talk about [this issue],” said Reis. “And the more attention we put on things like this, the more we make it a big deal, it becomes a big deal because it is, and that can motivate change conversations. It just needs to be talked about.”
She added, “[it was a blessing] to tell this story written by such an amazing [woman]. It was a masterpiece to tell.”
While López isn’t Inuit, she is no stranger to the violent effects of colonialism as a Latin American woman. She shared,
“I am aware of the many, many long historical issues of colonialism and ethnical violence because I come from Latin America. When I made Tigers Are Not Afraid, I showed it in Edmonton, Canada and half of that theater was [Indigenous]. They were floored by the movie. And at the end of the movie when the Q&A started, they started to stand up and tell their stories of losing women in their families and losing their friends and losing their sisters. It became very emotional and I felt the same way that I had when I talked about that subject matter in Tigers and before that in Casi divas.
Ultimately for López, with True Detective: Night Country, “there was an opportunity to continue that work of [addressing] gender violence that happens regardless of borders. It happens in Canada, it happens in the US, it happens in Mexico, it happens in Latin America. And voicing it has been part of my work forever.”
True Detective: Night Country premieres on Sunday, January 14, 2024 at 9 PM EST.
Categorized:Interviews
