Is Ennis, Alaska a Real Place? Where ‘True Detective’ Season 4 Was Filmed

True Detective: Night Country takes HBO viewers on a chilling adventure to the isolated town of Ennis, Alaska. Because Ennis is located so far north, and so close to the arctic circle, it’s one of the few locations on Earth that finds itself plunged into non-stop polar night during winter. True Detective Season 4 opens on the first day of polar night, which coincides with the freaky disappearance of an entire lab’s worth of scientists at the Tsalal Arctic Research Station. True Detective fans already know what happened to most of those scientists — with the exception of Raymond Clark (Owen McDonnell), they all turned into a “corpsicle” — but they might be left wondering if Ennis, Alaska is a real town. Did True Detective decamp to remote Alaska to film the fourth season? Or is Ennis a fictional place created simply for True Detective: Night Country?

True Detective: Night Country, aka True Detective Season 4, is the first incarnation of the popular HBO anthology series that hasn’t been written by the show’s creator, Nic Pizzolatto. Instead, Mexican auteur Issa López has adapted an original idea for a “Western in the ice” to be part of the True Detective universe. Jodie Foster stars as Ennis Police Chief Liz Danvers, a brilliant detective with a penchant for pissing people off. Kali Reis is Danvers’s former partner, Alaska State Trooper Evangeline Navarro. When Danvers discovers what appears to be an Indigenous woman’s tongue at the Tsalal Arctic Research Station, her wild new investigation is tied to a cold case that’s been haunting Navarro for years. Is what happened to the Tsalal scientists connected to the murder of Annie K (Nivi Pedersen)? Is some dark mystic force at work? Again: Is Ennis, Alaska a real town?!?!

We might have to wait a few weeks to find out how López ties up the various murder mysteries in True Detective: Night Country, but we already know what’s going on with Ennis, Alaska. Here’s everything you need to know about where True Detective Season 4 was filmed…

Is Ennis, Alaska a Real Place? Where Was True Detective Season 4 Filmed

So is Ennis, Alaska a real place? Nope! It is a fictional town created by Issa López as the setting of True Detective: Night Country.

According to HBO’s official show notes for the series, “López originally hoped to film the series in a real-life Alaskan town, [but] that corner of the world didn’t have the accessibility or room for the crew that such a large production needed, so they turned to Iceland instead.”

In addition to offering the production an insane tax credit, Iceland’s environs were more temperate than some of the other tundra-adjacent locations True Detective Season 4 considered. The show eventually landed on Keflavik, Iceland as their version of Ennis, Alaska. Keflavik looked like a lot of the Alaskan towns that had been considered and scouted because there used to be an American army base there during World War II. VFX was used to extend wide shots of the town and keep the level of snow consistent.

However, not everything was shot on location. According to HBO, interior sets were built on sound stages for the characters’ homes, the Ennis police station, and the pivotal Tsalal Arctic Research Station. Fun fact: the exterior of Tsalal was all VFX.

So if you find yourself so hooked on True Detective: Night Country that you want to vacation in Ennis, you’re out of luck. It’s not a real town. You could, however, visit Keflavik, Iceland. But be prepared for the street signs to look different and for Tsalal to not exist.