Issa López, the horror director whose best cinema now airs on HBO

Issa López

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	August 3, 1971 Mexico City, Mexico
Occupation	Filmmaker, screenwriter and showrunner
Known for	Something in the Dirt
Awards	Fantastic Fest · 2 Diosa de Plata · Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival · National Novel Award, Mexico's National Institute of Fine Arts

The largest audience Issa López has ever reached did not watch a film. It watched six episodes of television set in an Alaskan town where the sun stops rising, written and directed entirely by her, with Jodie Foster and Kali Reis working a case that begins with a tangle of frozen bodies on the ice. The Mexican filmmaker whose ghost story about orphaned children made Guillermo del Toro‘s list of favourite films of its year has not shot a feature since the small comedy that followed it. The werewolf western del Toro agreed to produce for her has yet to shoot. Her cinema, meanwhile, has moved to HBO.

The ghosts came early. Her mother died when López was eight, and the adults around her decided she should not go to the funeral, an absence she has described as a grief that never found its ending. Her father, a university professor of semiotics, raised her and her sister on little money and a lot of road: weekends driving from one small Mexican town to the next, watching kung fu and horror films in travelling cinemas and stopping in the towns locals swore were haunted. The nannies he hired filled the gaps with stories about witches. At sixteen she started, and never finished, a story about a boy trying to join a gang of street kids who would not have him.

She studied archaeology for about two years before film won the argument, then took a degree in directing and screenwriting at the film school of Mexico’s national university and a graduate programme in dramatic writing. The first paying work was Televisa, co-writing telenovelas such as Laberintos de pasión. She was thirty-two, having been born in Mexico City in August 1971, when Ladies’ Night, a romantic comedy she wrote, became the fifth biggest Mexican box-office hit of 2003 and 2004.

For most of the next decade that was the job, and she was good at it. She wrote Niñas mal for Sony, made her directing debut with Efectos secundarios for Warner Bros. in 2006, and followed it with Casi divas, a Sony comedy about a nationwide talent search that opened at number one in Mexico and carried a score by Hans Zimmer. In 2007 Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts gave her its National Novel Award. Almost nobody connected the hit-comedy writer with the girl from the haunted towns.

The connection came out of a collapse. In 2009 she moved to the United States to develop a film with producer Joe Roth at Sony; the project died, her father died, and López went back to the unfinished gang story from her teens. It became Vuelven, released in English as Tigers Are Not Afraid: a girl named Estrella, played by Paola Lara, loses her mother to cartel violence, receives three wishes in the form of chalk, and joins a band of orphans while the dead follow her through the streets. López shot it in 2015. Festivals, Sundance among them, turned it down. When it finally premiered at Fantastic Fest in Austin in September 2017, it won her the Best Horror Director award and started a run of festival prizes that included Best Director at Bucheon in South Korea, Best Picture and Best Director at Mexico’s Diosas de Plata, and ten Ariel nominations, two of them for her directing and her screenplay. Shudder brought it to American streaming in 2019. A modest Mexican comedy she wrote and directed, Todo mal, opened in March 2018.

Hollywood answered with announcements. Del Toro said he would produce her werewolf western. New Line acquired The Girl with a Thousand Names, about a child from another world held in a detention centre for unaccompanied minors at the US border, with López directing for HBO Max. Searchlight signed her to write and direct a feature with Noah Hawley producing, and Blumhouse set her up with Our Lady of Tears, drawn from a magazine account of a mass-hysteria outbreak at a Catholic girls’ school in Mexico. None of these has been reported in production.

What did reach the screen was True Detective: Night Country, which premiered on HBO on 14 January 2024. López took over the anthology from its creator, Nic Pizzolatto, wrote the season and directed all six episodes, moving it from the Southern gothic of its first season to Ennis, Alaska, where the men of an Arctic research station vanish during the polar night. Foster played police chief Liz Danvers and Reis played trooper Evangeline Navarro. HBO reported an average of 12.7 million cross-platform viewers per episode, above the 11.9 million of the first season. Foster won an Emmy; López received three Emmy nominations, for the series, the writing and the directing, plus a Writers Guild nomination.

The record also came with a feud, and with a caveat. Pizzolatto distanced himself from the season while it aired, posting “Can’t blame me” on Instagram, calling one plot point “so stupid” and, after the finale, reposting criticism that described it as a mess. López declined the fight. “That’s his prerogative,” she said, adding that she had written the season with love for his work. The quarrel went beyond authorship. Night Country traded the original’s long philosophical monologues for ghosts and an ending that refuses to say whether the dead were real, and that ambiguity is exactly what split the show’s older audience. The ratings comparison flatters her too: the first season aired before HBO had a streaming service to count viewers on. Her season won the numbers; it did not win back the show’s first fans.

HBO settled its own position quickly. In 2024 it renewed True Detective for a fifth season with López as showrunner and signed her to a multiyear overall deal. In October 2026 the network confirmed its leads: Nicolas Cage as Henry Logan, a New York detective, and Antonio Banderas as Rai García. The story moves to Jamaica Bay, in New York, and López has said it shares a world with her Alaska season. “It’s the same universe, and the magical realism is my brand, so it will be there,” she told TheWrap. Before the deal closed, Cage put it plainly: “I like Issa López a lot, and would be thrilled to work with her.”

Production on the fifth season starts in 2027, according to HBO, and no premiere date has been set. López will again write and direct. Her features remain on the slate without shooting dates, so the director of Tigers Are Not Afraid will spend at least another year making her cinema for television.

Tags: Guillermo del Toro, Nicolas Cage, Jodie Foster, True Detective, True Detective: Night Country, Issa López