While investigating old cases similar to Dora Lange's Cohle comes across the Light of the Way Academy, a school that was part of Rev. Tuttle's Wellspring Program.

These scenes were filmed at an old high school and junior high in Kenner that's been closed since 1996. The building dates back to the 1920s and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.

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This spillway was also used in the film Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Director of True Detective, Cary Fukunaga, worked on a short film with Beasts director Behn Zeitlin.

Fukunaga ended up hiring the production designer of Beasts, Alex DiGerlando, to create the haunting atmosphere of the first season of True Detective. (source: vulture)

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The burned-downed church in True Detective was constructed for the show near the Bonnet Carre Spillway. The flats surrounding the levee were not easy to reach. As the True Detective production designer recalls in an interview with vulture:

“You had to get to it by driving down a service road over a levee, down a mud road, and then we even had to drop down gravel to make it reachable. There was a lot of, Is this worth it?”

The result was the toxic verdant green of a watershed swamp, pocketed with light reflecting off the refineries and industrial-sized construction.

Constructed in 1931 (and about 12 miles west of New Orleans), the Bonnet Carre Spillway allows floodwaters from the Mississippi River to flow into Lake Pontchartrain and out into the Gulf of Mexico.

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From wiki:
Carcosa is a fictional city in the Ambrose Bierce short story "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" (1891).

Its name may be derived from the medieval city of Carcassonne in southern France, whose Latin name was "Carcaso".

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A deteriorating Civil War fortress in Louisiana called Fort Macomb was turned into the Yellow King's Carcosa for the season one finale of HBO's True Detective.

During the war the site guarded the Chef Menteur Pass, a water route connecting the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Pontchartrain. It was decommissioned in 1871 and is currently closed to the public.

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