Nightmare Fuel / True Detective

Being a gritty crime drama set in a Crapsack World, True Detective sure has moments that give you nightmares.

Spoilers Off applies to Moments pages. Spoilers are unmarked.

Season 1

• The murder that drives the plot is incredibly creepy. A woman is abducted, drugged, tortured with a knife and strangled? Nightmarish enough, but taken up to eleven with the staging of the body. The victim is stripped naked, posed in some surrealistic praying position, with a symbol drawn on her back and wearing a crown of deer antlers. The music by composer T Bone Burnett during the scene of Cohle and Hart's initial discovery of Lange's posed body just adds a lot to the creepiness.
• The reveal of the antler girl drawing in the burned-out old church. There's something creepy about the art style used for it, too.
• Cohle recounting to Hart the gruesome method the Mexican cartels he dealt with use on their victims; they tie a man down with duct tape to a chair bolted to the floor, cut around their face and then pull the skin off after which they cut his penis and testicles off and shove them down his throat. The man then either bleeds or chokes to death - all in front of a mirror.
  • Double so when you consider that there are Mexican cartels that actually use that method in real life, as several well-known and disturbing pictures showing the aftermath of the war among cartels show.
• Cohle's behaviour in 1995 (mentally ill reclusive, relapsing alcoholic, and quite antisocial) would be bad enough in a normal person. The fact he's a police officer, meant to protect the public, just makes it worse.
  • Summed up best by his conversation with the hooker he's buying drugs from in Episode 2:
    Hooker: You're kinda strange, like you might be dangerous.
    Rust: Of course I'm dangerous, I'm police, I can do terrible things to people with impunity.
• At one point, Cohle suspects a mentally ill man in the church's congregation who was a convicted sex offender of being the murderer. The reverend quickly proves it couldn't have been him, as Cohle discovers when he quickly inspects the man. He had been sloppily castrated in prison, enough that he couldn't have raped Dora Kelly Lange.
• Episode 3's final shot, a machete-wielding man in only a gas mask and his underwear walking through the wilderness. The fact that it ends on a freeze-frame adds to the surreal creepiness, just after the man appears to stare directly at the camera... then to the side, as if to check to see if he's alone with the viewer. The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You.
  • The entire sequence leading up to that- especially Cohle's monologue- ratchets up the tension very effectively and disturbingly.
• In the 2012 interview, Cohle mentions killing a man in his undercover days who injected his own infant daughter with crystal meth out of a desire to "purify her." At another point in 1995, Hart relates a story he heard about an addict killing his fiancée and cutting her up into little pieces when he was high and then, feeling remorse, tried to glue her back together.
• Anyone familiar with The King in Yellow felt like they had a bucket of cold water tossed over them in episode 2. This case just got much, much crazier.
  • Likewise, when Hart and Cohle go to interrogate him for the second time, Charlie Lange shares comments told to him by Reggie Ledoux about devil-worshipping rich men, makes reference to Carcosa, the Yellow King, "old stones" and the sacrificial killing of women and children in some remote woods. Fans of the Cthulhu Mythos know this sounds very much like a typical Lovecraftian cult.
• The shootout at the end of episode 4, with all the bullets flying and an overhead shot of people swarming over the scene, it's plainly obvious that a lot of people are dead and the police have little to no control over the situation. Cue credits.
• When arrested, Ledoux tells some rather troubling things to Cohle in a disturbingly resigned tone. He sees the corruption within Cohle, as his partner did, tells the detective that he's in Carcosa now, and alludes to the "black stars".
• The abandoned school, which clearly has something to do with some very bad things linked to the case and looks like it's straight out of Silent Hill. Made all the worse with the music swelling as Rust investigates it. You're just waiting for some terrifying reveal. Nothing Is Scarier indeed.
• Marty's family's subplot in Episode 5.
  • By 2002, his daughter Audrey becomes the moody, rebellious, All Girls Want Bad Boys type of goth and Marty catches her being double-teamed in a car by two older boys. All this while present day Marty is talking to the detectives about how time slipped through his fingers and he was inattentive where it mattered most.
    Hart: Remember what I said about the detective's curse? The solution to my whole life was right under my nose; that woman, those kids... I was watching everything else. See, infidelity is one kind of sin, but, my true failure was inattention. I understand that now.
  • In the first scene of the next episode, he engineers a pretty creepy situation to abuse his power as a policeman. When the two older boys are in a cell, he gives them an ultimatum: either they let him beat them badly, or he'll send them to prison where he'll use his contacts to make their lives living hell.
• The whole bit with the 'Marshland Medea', the woman killed her three children by taking them off life support. Rust manipulates her into confessing to the crime, then without a shred of emotion, tells her she should kill herself given the first opportunity, before abandoning her.
• The scene in the final episode, after we learn that Errol is the Yellow King - he's shown painting what looks to be a school building bright yellow, and is standing on a ladder near a bunch of playing children, whistling the most eerie tune imaginable as he works. The fact he's previously shown maintaining school buildings and their property, putting him in an area with very easy access to children, is sure to freak out anyone - especially if they have children.
• When Marty investigates Ledoux and Dewall’s hideout, he opens some shutter doors and sees something that makes him visibly horrified. Whatever he witnessed behind those doors was so sickening that he decides to storm out of the building, pull out his magnum, and splatter Ledoux’s brains all over the ground, as the man was kneeling and handcuffed.
• The reason Marty left the police force. Someone tried to dry their baby off in the microwave.
• The videotape. Dear god, that videotape. Incredibly unnerving without showing anything.
  • Cohle turns away when showing the tape to Hart, staring at the massive spiral on the storage unit's door. It was so horrible that Hart is immediately willing to devote the rest of his life (since he may die) to helping Cohle, the same man he never liked and the same man who put the final nail in the coffin for his marriage.
  • Hart watched at least twice. To try and identify the men in the masks.
  • While the two's reactions indicate how nightmarish the crimes committed in the tape are, the small snippets we see are insanely horrifying in their own right given the context. A gathering of freakishly masked men drag a weeping, terrified little girl dressed in the ceremonial antlers like those seen on the first episode's victim to an altar-like surface, pin her down, and hold her legs apart as a masked figure with a knife walks slowly towards her... Even though we (thankfully) aren't shown what happens next, the implications are abundantly clear.
  • The screaming we hear during the cutaway when Marty and Rust show Geraci the tape pretty effectively shows how awful it is, too. The worst part? The tape could be considered analogous to the play that drives people insane, if you've read the book...
• Ms. Dolores, the old woman who used to work for the Tuttles. During most of her interview with Cohle and Hart, she seems like the typical friendly, slightly dotty grandmother. That is, until Rust shows her drawings of the devil nets. Not only does she recognize them, she is happy to see them. She wasn't just aware of the cult, she was a member! It almost implies that the Yellow King cult is even bigger than Rust thought.
• The reveal of Errol Childress is really creepy, especially with the music sounding like an off-key jack-in-the-box.
• Errol's Carcosa lives up to the city's reputation.
  • The weird, abandoned Civil War fort in the season finale, with dusty old tunnels stuffed with branches, dark rooms where a killer might be hiding, and last but not least, an effigy of the King in Yellow made of skulls, antlers and yellow rags, with a stone slab in front of it.
  • The fact that Errol was drawing Rust closer into the ruins with his soothing taunts of "Come die with me, little priest" certainly adds to the creepy factor as well.
    • "Take off your mask!"
    • This particular line will drive a shiver down the spine of anyone who is familiar with The King In Yellow.
  • Various trophies are scattered throughout the maze, including children's shoes and a mummified corpse.
  • Cohle's hallucination of the cosmic void in at the Yellow King altar, if you interpret it pessimistically.
  • Before the chase, Cohle gets so creeped out by Errol's house that he immediately knows it's the place. Then, when he examines the shed, he finds Errol just standing near some woods, staring at him.

Season 2

• Velcoro beating the father of his child's bully. Imagine being a child and watching your father get beaten to a bloody pulp, and then being told it's all your fault. Especially when it is your fault. Especially when Velcoro stops only to tell you that if you ever do what you did again, he'll come back to kill and/or rape both your parents.
• Caspere's death. He had his eyes burnt out first, and an unexplained pelvic injury.
• The Birdman, a shotgun-toting, torturing figure all in black and an eerie mask.
• The opening of episode 3, a very Lynchian scene with Velcoro and his father in a dive bar. Particularly the reveal of the resolution of the previous episode's cliffhanger.
• The shootout at the end of episode 4, pure chaos, with multiple civilian casualties and officers down.
• Ray's plan for his wife's actual rapist: he'll cheesegrate his flesh off, including his penis. Other parts, such as his lips and testicles, he'll simply slice off while keeping him alive.
• Nails nailing and removing a nail from one of Amarilla's men just to get him to talk.
• The "powerful men" orgy from Ani's perspective, reeling from supposedly pure Molly but what seemed more like a date-rape drug. Older men leering at her, nightmarish and trippy sex scenes, and Ani having creepy flashbacks to a man from her childhood on the commune...
• Frank interrogating and eventually executing Blake. On the one hand, it's extremely cathartic. But on the other hand, Frank shows once again that while he may not be as monetarily powerful as he once was, he is still a huge physical threat. Special notes go to his crazy eyes as he strangles Blake and how watches him die after he shoots him in the stomach.
  Frank: "Look me in the eyes. I wanna watch your lights go out."

Season 3

• The disappearance of the Purcell children is pure nightmare fuel for any parent. Made worse by the fact that it's a situation where both bad possible outcomes play out: one child is found dead, the other is still alive but psychologically damaged by what was done to them.
• Witnessing the mental decline of Hays, someone who had once been extremely sharp and competent is chilling. It doesn't matter who you are or what you did, you too can be affected by this illness and there is nothing you can do to stop or reverse it.

Season 4

• The Corpsesicle. It looks like a frozen Fusion Dance of the missing scientists' naked bodies, with burned-out eyes, obvious signs of frostbite (black fingers and toes), blood dripping from their ears, and terrified expressions.
• While the Ennis Police Department is excavating the corpses of the scientists from frozen ice, one of the officers breaks off an arm belonging to the corpses. And the corpse screams, freaking out the officers. Turns out the screaming man was Anders Lund who were not quite as dead.
• The abandoned trailer that Danvers and Navarro find in Part 2. Buried under the snow, it contains a multitude of handmade figurines, a bunch of Annie's possessions, and even a human-sized doll on the bed. It's very evocative of Errol Childress's "Carcosa" from Season 1.
• Anders Lund when he finally wakes up; screaming in pain and terror, both legs and one arm amputated, the skin on his fingers and face turned black from severe hypothermia. Danvers isn't able to get much out of him other than they woke "her" up and that she "came for [them] in the dark" before he has to be sedated again. Almost immediately afterwards, Hank's hillbilly hunter friends get into a drag out fight in the lobby with the Ennis police and hospital staff, and Danvers is pulled away to deal with it, leaving Navarro to watch Hank. As she's standing in the door, looking out into the hallway, we are treated to a shot of the still-sedated Lund sitting up in his bed, and start speaking to Navarro in a very deep, gravelly voice while pointing at her. The close-up of his ruined face as he speaks really doesn't help either. And as soon as he's done speaking, he calmly lies back down and then immediately goes into some sort of arrest and dies.
  Lund: "Hello Evangeline. Your mother says hello. She's waiting for you."
• When Liz finds Otis and asks him where Raymond is hiding, the latter says that he's hiding in "The Night Country" in a panicking voice.
• The birthing scene, where it looks like the child might be stillborn. The midwives do revive it, but it is a very long sixty seconds until they do.
• The ghosts and their antics. They don't speak; they just point accusingly. If you follow them, you could be going to your death. Or they might just show you reminders of old traumas while you're all alone.
• The setting itself. A tiny, desolate town run by an Evil Corporation, where the water is poisoned, babies keep dying, the dead are restless, hypothermia is a constant worry, and the next sunrise is a month from now? No thanks.

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