In this op-ed, writer Elly Belle explores the Kristen Stewart-led ghost show Living for the Dead and its themes of solidarity, collective power, and inner healing.
If you weren’t a believer in the supernatural before, you might just be transformed in more ways than one by Living for the Dead, the queer ghost show that premiered in October. Ghostbusters meets Queer Eye, Living for the Dead (from Scout Productions, which also did Queer Eye) sets out to befriend and then banish spirits disrupting public spaces in hopes of a mystical makeover. The Hulu reality show is narrated and produced by none other than Kristen Stewart. The series follows five queer mystics — Ken Boggle, Juju Bae, Roz Hernandez, Alex LeMay, and Logan Taylor — traveling across America to explore strange and unusual happenings in seemingly haunted hotels, houses, and more.
One of the tag lines is “helping the living by healing the dead.” Unlike predecessors like Ghost Hunters, it dares to explore not just the supernatural elements of the world, but what haunts us within ourselves and the communities we live in. As a queer and trans mystic myself, and someone who has recently been navigating the tragic deaths of cherished loved ones in my own life, the show resonated strongly with a clear message: we cannot find or create comfort and healing in isolation. We need each other to heal.
While it would be wonderful to live in a world where having a marginalized identity doesn’t so often come with trauma, we live in the one we do where people and systems can be cruel. To be queer and trans oftentimes means we face horrors of our own on a daily basis — whether that’s states like Florida enacting anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, or to be queer and Palestinian, or even on a more personal and individual scale, trying to heal from denying your own identity or being forced to stay “in the closet.” That’s why there’s so much art about horror being brought into the world through the queer and trans lens currently, and it’s only growing.
The show asks us to look at the haunted elements of everyday life: what shadows live within us and our relationships with each other? Each episode contains nuggets of self-reflection on facing our inner demons, to help us face the scariest parts of the outside world — which we can’t do if we’re hiding from ourselves.
The first episode explores a family-owned motel haunted by restless and aggressive clown spirits. Each of the hosts and mystics is called on to face unexpected challenges in order to grow in their talents and complete their goals. By the end of the first episode, the crew has succeeded at eradicating the aggressive spirits from the clown motel, but they’ve also seemingly succeeded at something much greater — facing themselves. In a voiceover at the end, Stewart seemingly clarifies the whole premise of the show: “Do you fear the mask, or what’s behind it? You’ll never know if you’re too afraid to look.”
The show offers a road map for how to deal with whatever haunts us, and for those who are marginalized or oppressed by systems and social conditions, those horrors can be many. When you’re a queer person or anything outside of what society has deemed acceptable, just trying to get through the day can feel like navigating a haunted house.
But the show isn’t just about healing ourselves; it’s about looking inward to heal our ills, so we can help our larger communities with theirs. At the end of the second episode, after the crew has explored another haunted hotel, Ken — who is working through some of his greatest fears surrounding speaking to spirits — observes that healing his own trauma is vital to helping heal trauma in the outside world.
“Owning your power is vital… The demons we sometimes deal with that are the hardest are those we find within ourselves,” he says. And there’s no talisman like “a crystal or crucifix or anything in the world that can protect you more than your own power within yourself.” By the end of this episode, Stewart declares, “Nothing can be stronger than you because everything that is, is in you. Your power is the strongest because it’s yours. And mine is mine.”
Declaring, and most importantly, believing in our own individual but also collective power is the only way to face the horrors of the world — which currently include the ongoing bombing and incursion campaign that Israel is waging in Gaza, which UN experts have said points to a genocide in the making. As of Dec. 12, over 17,700 deaths have been reported, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, with 8 in 10 Gazans now experiencing homelessness. Though the bombing is relentless, many have used their collective power to demand a ceasefire, which has been a beautiful act of solidarity to witness and personally participate in.
What does all this have to do with a ghost show? Well, how could it not? Death and destruction are, unfortunately, seemingly just a part of human nature and the history of the world. Wars, genocides, seemingly endless pain for the most oppressed people. There’s even more pain and loss in the world that we now must figure out how to pick up the pieces of and build a better one from the ashes and rubble.
“The haunting and unfinished business is the injustices against oppressed peoples, like Palestinians. We will all be haunted forever by what we’ve allowed to happen,” Nadia Shammas, a queer, disabled Palestinian person tells Teen Vogue. “And the haunting is not a bad thing. It just means that people living at the core of the empire have wrongs to right.” So how can we take the lessons from our own pain and apply it to how we show up in our lives that either helps or harms others? What version of yourself will you show up when it is the hardest to dig deep and muster compassion over cruelty? “A core part of my family's spirituality as Palestinian people is remembering and honoring liberation and reparation, our martyrdom for what and who has been lost,” Shammas continues. “This haunting extends and hangs around us, as past violence (genocide, slavery) and present violence (incarceration, policing) against Indigenous and Black Americans continues unresolved, not yet righted. We won't know peace until it is.”
Over the course of eight episodes, Living for the Dead turns a fundamental tenet of horror on its head, challenging the idea that the mystical realm contains any actual evil at all. The team approaches the spirits that they help from almost a more abolitionist point of view to leave the spaces they haunt as though they were never “bad” to begin with, but instead seeking help the same way the humans seek to be free of them.
In episode seven, the crew comes up against a 100-year curse in the infamous House of Wills, a building that once belonged to the founder of the local NAACP chapter and is riddled with restless paranormal activity in Cleveland, Ohio. They’re told that the building was designed by a freemason who created it specifically so that energy would be trapped inside it. Shamari, a Black man who had an encounter with spirits in the house years prior, contacted the crew to help because he felt he had been cursed and wanted the place to be healed and exorcized so it could become a community center for young, struggling kids, especially from Black communities.
Deep in the basement, the mystics do find many distressed spirits and, as each time before, approach them as beings who are seeking help instead of ones with malicious intent. Because of their kind and measured approach, in some of the final encounters in the season, they are able to learn what the spirits need in order to move on. Part of that is needing Shamari to face his inner demons from his past, including his experiences with the foster system.
The conclusion of the episode ultimately proves that at the end of the day, the spirits want to be seen and heard — collaborated with — and we cannot help anyone heal by demonizing them. The spirits want liberation just as much as the humans want it. That’s so often true for anything or anyone we deem “bad,” but especially for the things we deem “evil” inside of ourselves. Pain is often a cry for help that we don’t know how to ask for.
Real evil exists, yes. But it’s not in spirits that need to be banished from one realm into another — more often it is greed and violence or any form of harm against oppressed people that is the true evil.
From helping the spirits pass on, the conclusion Living for the Dead actually comes to is that binaries are false, of course. Life requires a more nuanced perspective. There is no good vs. evil. More simply, there are those of us who are willing to heal and use the resources, community, and love at our disposal to do so, and there are those who refuse. Living for the Dead pointedly asks, in essence, which will you be?
