‘Living for the Dead’ Blends Humor and Love of ‘Queer Eye’ With Ghost Hunting [Exclusive]
Hulu’s Living for the Dead introduces viewers to “Fabulous 5” queer “ghost hunties” who travel the country to “help the living by healing the dead.” It’s like Queer Eye goes ghost-hunting!
From the producer of Queer Eye, the series approaches ghost hunting the same way it meets a good makeover – with plenty of love and lots of laughs. But unlike Queer Eye, this show’s jump scares aren’t from a hideous jumpsuit. Instead, the paranormal definitely comes to play in each of the episodes.
‘Living for the Dead’ ghost hunts with a different perspective
Living for the Dead executive producer, Rob Eric explained to Showbiz Cheat Sheet how his team of ghost hunters determined which “haunts” to investigate.
“At first, we thought, let’s go to places nobody else has been before,” he said. “But because our team is so unique and we come at it in a different perspective, particularly, the LGBTQIA of it all, our community does see things in a different light. We do approach things differently.”
“So we learned this years ago. I produce Queer Eye as well. And like on Queer Eye, we approach the art of living and lifestyle differently than other people,” Eric added. “So here is this gift to be able to teach to other people. And I think our team did that so gloriously. Like they approached everything differently. And we may have seen something before, but you didn’t see it through their eyes. And it becomes a completely unique perspective at that point.”
Who are the ‘Living for the Dead’ ghost hunties?
Queer Eye approaches each hero makeover from all angles, which is exactly what is done on Living for the Dead. The cast includes gifted individuals who bring years of experience to the series and their unique perspectives from talking to dead people.
The cast includes a tarot card reader, Ken Boggle; Alex LeMay the tech expert; Logan Taylor a psychic medium; Roz Hernandez the paranormal researcher and Juju Bae a witch. The Fab 5 paranormal researchers visit chilling locations like the Copper Queen Hotel, Waverly Hills Sanatorium, the Clown Hotel, the Palace Theater, and the Palomino.
In addition to Scout Productions and Eric, actor Kristen Stewart is also an executive producer and narrates the series. “This is just the beginning for us and for Living for the Dead,” Stewart told People. “We wanna one day have traipsed across the entire spooky ass country. Maybe the world!”
Like ‘Queer Eye,’ each ‘Living for the Dead’ ghost hunter has a specialty
Boggle told Showbiz Cheat Sheet he realized he had a gift when he actually saw dead people in his house and learned from his grandmother it was a generational gift.
“My Aunt Caroline came with a poker deck and she taught me how to read fortunes,” he recalled. “I went back to grannie’s house and said, ‘Look what I could do.’ She said, ‘That’s great, but big boys do tarot, so let’s go get to a tarot deck.'”
“From that point forward, 31 years of shuffling the cards and changing people’s lives, I developed a tarot spread that allows me to look into the other side and have every aspect of that person and their spirit and their environment as a spirit and everything you want to know about them. So I use that to discern between positive spirits, negative spirits, lost loved ones,” he added.
Taylor also discovered he was a psychic medium as a child. “I was a little boy when I started really interacting with spirits. It was kind of a family thing. It ran in my family, but it wasn’t something that was talked about. I live in a really small southern town, so I was always drawn to the paranormal, even when I wasn’t supposed to,” he said. “Then after high school, I decided to start reading professionally. And then I discovered ghost hunting with some friends of mine here. And it was all just a snowball effect. I joke that I’ve been running from the paranormal since I got into it years ago, but it just keeps finding me. It’s something I was born into and I’m never getting out of it.”
Not all ‘Living for the Dead’ ghost hunties discovered their passion for the paranormal in their youth
Unlike Boggle and Taylor, Bae said she didn’t discover her gift until adulthood. “This is something that came to me sort of in my mid-twenties and I was like, ‘What is this? Why am I having these dreams? Where are my dreams coming true? What are these things that I’m feeling and hearing?’ And so I started to research it,” she said. “I started to study. I was kind of like, What? What does this mean? And I was like, ‘Oh, it means I’m a witch. Oh, there are other witches!’ There are people that do this for their livelihood.”
LeMay had a paranormal experience as a child, which sparked her interest in investigating. “I think I had a good dose of being skeptical when I was young with everything that was happening. And I’ve always been science-based, tech-based, I’ve always worked on electronics growing up, and it kind of melded together at some point where now I can capture it and show it to the world,” she said.
Hernandez, the residential paranormal researcher said she’s the group skeptic. “I definitely am the most skeptical of this group,” she said. “I like the facts. And I like to get into dead people’s business. So somebody like Logan, for example, will give us sort of a feeling that he’s getting. And I’m like, all right, let’s fact-check that and see what I can find. Because, you know, that to me is really interesting insight. If we can get as many different sources or different types of evidence to confirm what’s going on.”
Hulu’s original series, Living for the Dead premieres on Wednesday, October 18 with all 8 episodes.
