There is a void at the center of all things, an unknowable hole into which we are all slowly spiraling, sometimes at such a glacial pace we hardly realize it’s happening. A great noir film depicts a character (or characters) attempting to know the void or stop their descent into its grasp. They always fail. The void always wins.
It’s the tenet of the genre that rings the most chilling. Noir often attacks real-life institutions like government, big business, and religious bodies in ways that create a resonance and often stem from dirty truths we’d rather ignore. Nobody likes to feel like a pawn. Noir often asserts that that’s exactly what most of us are.
It’s a set of themes and narrative devices that lends itself just as well to horror as it does noir, though the two genres cross paths more seldom than one may expect. When they do though, and when that marriage is done well, it makes for storytelling that will chill you to the bone. There are few greater examples of how powerful a fusion this can be than the first season of the HBO show True Detective.
You probably know the story by now, given the lasting legacy of the show. Under showrunner Nic Pizzolatto, actors Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson play detectives Rust Cohle and Marty Hart, two prickly cops in the bayou of New Orleans investigating a string of murders over the course of a decade. In writing the series, Pizzolato drew just as heavily from noir and crime fiction as he did Lovecraftian horror, metatextual comic books, and Robert W. Chambers’ short story collection The King in Yellow. The result made for must-watch TV when it premiered back in 2014 and while season two (bad) and three (good) have left legacies of their own, it’s that first eight-episode story that has gone down as some of the most iconic television of the decade, opening the doors for leading men and women of film to try their hand at starring in television.
Photo Credit: HBO
Its genius, though, comes in Pizzolatto being one of the first filmmakers to (successfully, and on a large scale) recognize the parallels between noir and Lovecraftian horror and find a way to have them function in tandem. Much like noir, Lovecraftian horror (a veritable subgenre pioneered by acclaimed author and shitbrained racist H.P. Lovecraft and refined or perfected by everyone from John Carpenter to Junji Ito) operates on the fear of the unknown. It often concerns characters stumbling upon the pitch-black secrets behind the layer of reality that we live in and fundamentally breaking under the weight of those revelations.
The evils at the heart of Lovecraftian horror may function under the aesthetics of Elder Gods, tentacled psychic monsters, and gateways to other dimensions, but the message is ultimately the same as that of noir: there is something horrible out there controlling us and to glimpse it will mean the end of you. You do not want the answers you seek.
Photo Credit: HBO
Now, let’s be clear: True Detective is not a horror-noir. It does not actually feature Cthulu rising from the swamps of Louisiana, though it certainly seemed like it might end up there in the weeks leading to the series finale. Saying it doesn’t contain staples of the horror genre wouldn’t be accurate, but it avoids the full-on genre fusion of something like Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Image Comics series Fatale, which is about as literal a horror-noir as you’re likely to find.
No, what stands out about True Detective’s take on horror and noir operating in the same space is that it doesn’t so much inject elements of horror into a noir story as it does depict many of its most noir elements through the lens of horror. The killer Marty and Rust are hunting is depicted, at least through the drawings of one of his victims, as a tentacle-faced monstrosity. The network of powerful men behind the disappearances and murders they’re investigating invoke cultlike imagery.
Photo Credit: Lacey Terrell / HBO
Suspects, witnesses, and victims they encounter along the way speak of the mysterious land of “Carcosa” and the “King in Yellow,” the puppeteer pulling all of the strings attached to the case. These are explicit references to horror elements of the aforementioned Chambers stories and seem to imply that there’s something legitimately otherworldly behind this case.
There isn’t (spoiler alert for a five-year-old television series). The King in Yellow is a deranged murderer, but ultimately human, nothing more, nothing less. Carcosa is a labyrinth of tunnels and trees on his property, containing alters and bones. He’s certainly behind the ritualistic murders, but those rituals are simply set dressing for the true terror: the havoc he’s wreaked on innocent women and children for decades and the extent to which he was protected by the forces that should have taken him down. The shadowy cabal of church and government officials who seem to be involved? They’re not a cult worshipping at the feet of Elder Gods. They’re just powerful men doing what they so often do: abusing that power.
Isn’t that scarier, though? Tentacled gods and the cults that worship them are only so scary. We know they aren’t real. The beauty of what Pizzolatto did with that first season of True Detective is that he depicted everyday horror as not being of this world, as the void at the center of all things, beyond comprehension. What Marty and Rust see in dim Carcosa is not something humans are meant to lay eyes on. That they escape with their lives is but a stroke of luck, and they do so without defeating the grander evil at play. It’s horror. It’s noir. It’s perfect.
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