Bray Wyatt Was Wrestling’s Horror Icon

When Wyatt wasn’t in his red-sweater or Firefly Funhouse regalia, he was in his masked alter-ego, The Fiend. Donning a terrifying face crafted by none other than horror legend Tom Savini, The Fiend was like something straight out of a nightmare. He carried a severed head lantern that rembled Wyatt’s cult leader persona and came out to a twisted metal cover of his old entrance music. He wore gloves with “HEAL / HURT” across the knuckles, and WWE frequently sold out of replica costume masks because people were immediately obsessed with the look. To add to the terror of The Fiend, he adopted one of the most devastating moves in all of wrestling — the Mandible Claw.

Popularized by the Mick Foley wrestling persona Mankind, the Mandible Claw sees a wrestler putting their hands in the mouths of their opponent, jamming fingers underneath the tongue while their thumb or palm presses the outside of the jaw upward. If you do it right, you can cause someone to black out. It’s intimate, it’s gross, and it’s terrifying to see in action, which made it the perfect move for the unstoppable Fiend. To add to the horror, The Fiend often wrestled matches under red lighting, a means of throwing people off their rhythm and cloaking the audience in blood red.

When The Fiend became the WWE Universal Champion, Savini’s studio was once again tapped to create a championship belt, and did so by completely ignoring the conventions of a big, gold faceplate … and instead designing a literal face plate based on the mask. It was as if The Fiend was wearing his own stretched flesh across his waist, looking like something out of a Rob Zombie movie. Considering Zombie’s most famous horror movie creation is the Firefly Family of “House of 1,000 Corpses,” “The Devil’s Rejects,” and “3 From Hell,” it’s fitting that the man who used to walk amongst the fireflies would express such similar horrors.