Reality meets bizarre in the 'Mad House'
Like most reality-show contestants, Eric Lindquist knew there would be some bizarre twist when he signed up for the Sci Fi Channel's new "Mad Mad House" series.
After all, it is the Sci Fi Channel.
Still, the 24-year-old North Andover native was "dumbfounded" when he discovered the premise of the new show, which debuts at 9 tonight on the cable channel.
Ten ordinary guests will live in a Los Angeles home with a real-life vampire, a witch, a voodoo priestess, a nudist, and a modern primitive (someone who brands, scars, tattoos, and pierces his body).
Not only will they all share sleeping quarters in a dark, Goth-looking mansion, but the contestants will also have to participate in various rituals. Tonight it means splashing around in a pool of stage blood and joining in a voodoo ceremony. If they refuse, they risk being voted off the program by the judges, the self-described "alternative lifestyle practitioners" who inhabit the house.
"I was spooked," said Lindquist. "It was crazy."
Indeed, tonight Don Henrie, the so-called vampire, will select Lindquist as his roommate and insist that Lindquist lie down, briefly, in the coffin where Henrie usually sleeps.
"I'm claustrophobic and he closed the coffin on me," Lindquist recalls. "The whole experience was like beyond the beyond."
On the other hand, the guest who endures the next 10 weeks will win $100,000.
"Mad Mad House" is part of Sci Fi's new Thursday night block, two hours of edgy original series. Tonight at 10:30, the channel is launching its first animated series, "Tripping the Rift," a comedy about the adventures of a group of outlaw aliens on a spaceship. At 10, the channel is premiering the second season of "Scare Tactics," a hidden-camera show in which innocent people are set up in hoaxes reminiscent of horror movies.
"Mad Mad House" was a stretch for the channel because reality and science fiction should be mutually exclusive, said Mark Stern, executive vice president of original programming for the network.
"It's been a challenge to find a show that makes sense for us," said Stern. "What's interesting about this show is that it makes you question your tolerance of other people's philosophies. Hopefully, people will shed a bit of their repression and see that these people" -- the "Alts," as they're called -- "are not just freaks."
Apparently, they're not actors either. Producer Arthur Smith, who produced Fox's "Paradise Hotel" last year, interviewed about 500 candidates he tracked down through mostly alternative lifestyle associations before he settled on the cast.
"We wanted real, authentic people who were eloquent about their lifestyle," he said.
His choices include Art Aguirre, a San Diego piercing artist who likes to suspend his body on hooks to relax. Iya Ta'Shia Asanti is a poet and performance artist from Colorado who has educated herself in the tenets of the West African spiritual traditions known by the name Voodoo.
Don Henrie is a former San Diego engineer who decided he prefers living a vampire's life. Fiona Horne is a former singer who is now a practicing Wiccan in Los Angeles. David Wolfe, also known as Avocado, is a former mechanical engineer turned "naturist" who now teaches courses on nutrition in Arizona.
To be sure, there were unusual liability issues to consider during production. Henrie, for example, insisted on drinking real human blood. "Obviously, there are blood disease issues to worry about," Stern said. "The participants drank staged blood, although they think it's real."
There is also a scene in which Horne educates the contestants, each wearing a noose, about the Salem Witch Trials. One participant, who hasn't been paying attention, falls through a trap door, noose around his neck. "We attached the noose in a way so that safety was not an issue," Stern said.
It's no coincidence that many of the contestants are conservative Christians. Kelly Keefe, 25, lives in a New York City convent. Brent Ellis, 22, is a student at Abilene Christian University in Texas. "We wanted the show to be entertaining," Smith says, when asked about the casting choices.
For his part, Lindquist, who graduated from Northeastern University in 2001 before moving to Los Angeles to work as an assistant to a sports agent, said he had no moral inhibitions. "I was very anxious at first," he said. But in the end, he says, he learned some things.
"I don't think Don wanted us to become vampires. He just wanted us to enlighten ourselves and be open to different lifestyles."
Whatever.
Suzanne Ryan can be reached at sryan@globe.com
