How “True Detective: Night Country” created the horror of its unsolved case

“True Detective: Night Country” lives up to its name, because it makes the night – or more precisely the 30 days of polar night in the fictional town of Ennis in Alaska – seem like a monster waiting to devour you. Or, as cameraman Florian Hoffmeister puts it: “If you turn off the lights in Alaska, you die.”

Giving the HBO crime series a gritty look that's perhaps a little more supernatural required, counterintuitively, focusing on the elements of light. There's little to unravel when Ennis Police Chief Liz Danvers (Jodi Foster) and her former partner, Alaska State Trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), begin investigating a tangle of bodies found frozen near the Tsalal Research Station.

But people living this far north can feel a little more human in many ways, from the lighting in their homes to …