Happy Halloween everyone. It’s the most wonderful time of the fear. Hope the spooky scary skeletons treat you nice this season, and you finally get to egg that crusty old Dean.
Halloween isn’t normally the best time to be a wrestling fan because normally that means Hell in a Cell and in the last five years Hell in a Cell matches haven’t exactly been the most reliable.
However, with Hell in a Cell already out the way, WWE decided to schedule their second most horrific PPV type, a Saudi Arabia show.
Boooooo, look at all that blood, just all over WWE’s hands, don’t worry I’m not going to spend another list pissing all over WWE’s disgustingly gold plated chips, we did that last week, check it out if you feel like feeling sad for a little bit, this week, we’re celebrating something a bit more positive. Like… a bit more.
We’re looking at the wrestlers who were best at striking fear into the hearts of the audience, but like, in a fun way, like… mostly in a fun way.
I’m Adam, hailing from partsFUNknown and these are our 10 Scariest Wrestlers of All Time
10. The Undertaker
Oh I can hear you all rushing to your keyboards, the sad inevitability of feigned outrage, surely as the most famous horror-themed gimmick of all time, SURELY the undertaker has to be number one.
Well he isn’t, and don’t call me Shirley, because, and I’ll say it slowly for everyone to understand, The Undertaker is not now and never has been scary.
He wasn’t scary as a dead cowboy like he was in a Deadwood branded pantomime, he wasn’t scary as a biker, unless you think burying Kurt Angle is scary, and he wasn’t scary in his final incantation of the Deadman, no matter how many rocking chairs he set fire to with lightning.
He’s a legendary spookums gimmick so yes it would be heresy to leave him off the list, but here’s a list of non-scary things Undertaker has done.
That Netflix movie which is nowhere near as good as we were hoping for, making Josh Matthews talk like him with possession, taking Teddy Long on a shisha joyride, that weird laugh he had with Brock Lesnar, killing his friend with cement.
I guess the closest Prop Tragedy ever came to IRL shivers was Ministry of Darkness Taker but that’s mostly because he tried to once marry Stephanie McMahon, a truly terrifying prospect.
9. The Boogeyman
I mean… right… scary feels like a strong word for a man who looks like if Flava Flav died by drowning in ketchup.
He’s more like a stripper that’s taken his gimmick too far than a demon, but you can’t really deny that The Boogeyman was, at the very least, unnerving.
Like, you’re really uncomfortable when he’s around, but that’s mostly down to the ick factor of the image of him with a mouth of real-life worms. Like yes, that sets my oh no senses tingling.
Hearing his entrance music filled me with dread as a younger fan, so I guess that’s something in the neighbourhood of fear, although it’s probably the part of the neighbourhood that would smell really bad and have to be situated at least 15 blocks away from a school.
Maybe he counts more as scary because if you don’t act afraid of him, Jim Cornette will find you and slap the shit out of you. It all adds up.
8. Abadon
Just really distressing to look at. Wrestling history is full of people who wouldn’t otherwise seem that scary but have managed to create an intimidating look out of face paint.
Sting is a big silly grandpa, but the face paint makes him spooky, Luna Vachon those cracks and veins she used to paint on her face made her seem genuinely crazy, ditto Bull Nakano.
Rosemary has worked wonders with the paint, Demon Finn Balor creates something cool apart from that one time, at Halloween lest we forget when he morphed into Demon Finn, Pumpkin Spice edition, but by far and away, the pinnacle of wrestling makeup is Abadon because Jesus Christ.
You are what you eat, and they just walked down to the ring immediately after eating the girl from the ring without even wiping the blood off first.
Genuinely it’s better monster design than in half of modern horror cinema.
Abadon looks like what WWE thinks Lily looks like, and if you woke up to find them standing at the foot of your bed, you would scream your brain out through your eyes.
7. Jake Roberts
Silence is scarier than noises, a dagger is scarier than a firework and you know what’s a hundred times scarier than a crazy tall roided up meathead screaming into the void about how he’s going to pummel you?
A man calmly looking into your eyes and describing in flat unemotional terms about how he’s going to ruin your life.
Intention is everything with our number seven, Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts, who inspired fear in his fellow man in two ways.
First of all, carrying a f**king huge python to the ring, which he’d occasionally attach to you mouth-first, and yup fair enough that’ll do it, that’s enough for Andre The Giant to nope right out of the industry all together, but the other is his style of promos, and honestly they’re the kind of gothic poetric that Bray Wyatt could only dream of.
Articulate, calculating and possessed with a truly unnerving stillness, that kind that freezes you in place, unable to look away like a deer held in the headlights of an oncoming car, which is before you even take into account his theme music which is the best soundtrack an 80s slasher movie never had.
Why don’t you come and see how the devil’s work is done. Jake The Snake was one of the scariest men walking in his day… Trust me.
6. Kevin Sullivan
Now listen, I’m not talking about the Dungeon of Doom, I’m not talking about this. That was very silly and come off like if Scooby Doo had its budget slashed so Hanna Barbara had to start making it in their garage.
I’m talking about his time in the territories, namely Championship Wrestling from Florida and his Prince of Darkness gimmick. See, in the 80s Satanic Panic was at its peak.
Terrified parents were lashing out in all directions at anything that seemed like a corrupting influence over their baffling teenage children, including Dungeons and Dragons (Matt Mercer eats babies and that’s a confirmable fact), evil rock bands and of course, cults, cults everywhere.
In response, Kevin Sullivan decided to scoop up all the heat in the world, by starting a sex cult faction, the Army of Darkness years before Evil Dead 3.
He painted his face, savaged people with his gang of degenerates, the whole thing was designed specifically to tap into the new American horror for terrifying gangs, in the wake of the Manson family murders.
Sullivan kidnapped and brainwashed multiple women, he essentially created the insane character of Luna Vachon, they brought snakes to the ring, daubed themselves in occult symbols, and it bloody worked, making him a top heel in multiple promotions.
5. Ox Baker
Good villains are built around myth. It’s harder for misinformation to spread in the internet age except what the f**k am I talking about of course it isn’t, but it probably would be hard for a wrestler to inspire terror in quite the same way managed by Ox Baker.
See, Ox Baker had a simple, but terrifying reputation, that his finishing move killed people. Wrestling really was easier back then.
Baker, who wrestled from 1964 to [checks notes] 2014?? He retired at 80 years old? Bloody hell, and his finisher was the heart punch, which is when he punches you in the chest, wrestling was easier back then.
It sounds tame, but the move became infamous when he was connected to two deaths in the 1970s.
In 1971, Alberto Torres died from a ruptured appendix following a match featuring Baker, and the following year another wrestler called Ray Gunkel died of a heart attack in the locker room following a match with, that’s right, Ox Baker.
Neither deaths were in real life caused by the heart punch, but they were both worked into Baker’s gimmick, giving him and his finisher a fearsome myth surrounding them, so much so that Baker once started a full-blown riot by heart punching one of his opponents over and over. Now that’s terror.
4. New Jack
Ox Baker capitalized on real-life deadly injuries to generate fear in the wrestling business, New Jack decided to cut out the middle man. And repeatedly cut many middle men.
Instability is scary, never quite being sure when someone is about to snap and make it their god’s given mission to put you through a wall.
Some wrestlers are scary because of sound effects, smoke, mirrors and by projecting maggots on a ring canvas, New Jack is scary because he legitimately tried to kill someone during a match, in his own words he tried to kill Vic Grimes by throwing him from a scaffold.
And it’s not even wrestlers who are terrified of New Jack, fans should be too, after all, he’s demonstrably not a man concerned by collateral damage. What if Vic Grimes landed in the ground?
When he went nuts and decided to make an example out of Gypsey Joe, what about all the other fans in attendance in danger of being hit by flying objects, New Jack was throwing chairs around with children less than 20 feet away, he’s a f**king terrifying madman, and I really must be clear than none of this is praise.
3. The Fiend
Windham Rotunda has really had a career of horror highs and horror lows.
When Bray Wyatt first arrived in WWE he was a wonderfully eerie creation, drenched in southern gothic menace, words of honey poison, and the henchmen from Wrong Turn at his beck and call.
That gimmick devolved somewhat to the point of haunted tractors, dirty fridges and whatever mud-smeared shakycam tedium the New Day’s Big Vacation at the Firefly compound was supposed to be. Bad, that.
Bray Wyatt went away and, like Bruce Wayne, found a costumed alter ego to strike fear into the hearts of criminals everywhere.
The Saga of the Fiend was not always good, but bloody hell it was always interesting, at some point legit psychological horror, and the kind of slasher invulnerability that Jason looks at with pure envy in his side-eye.
The Fiend may be gone but his debut at SummerSlam will never be forgotten.
The lantern carved out the severed head of his past failed gimmick, is possibly my favourite prop in the history of the business, beats the hell out of an urn. It might be the best horror monster debut ever?
Actually wait, it’s the second, the first has gotta be…
2. Kane
Kane was the best. OG Kane was the goddamn best.
Every pyro a jumpscare, my personal favorite mask in all of wrestling, the costume that somehow avoided looking like a power ranger villain and managed to be both imposing and cool, his freakish speed for a big guy, his insane raw power, the fact that for a while he was silent.
Kane was so physically composed, much like his brother, able to channel stillness into something far more deadly than rage, with that mask only complimenting that poise to make you doubly unsure of when he was suddenly going to feed you your entire soul.
And of course, that debut, maybe the best ever, the thick red light, ripping the door of its hinges, WWE’s obsessed with making movies, well Kane is the best horror movie they ever made, hands down, hands thrown down to make f**king fire appear which is still cool to this day.
I wish he hadn’t become a big red mayor, I wish he hadn’t done a lot of things, mostly involving Shane McMahon’s poor victimised testicles, but I will never forget how terrified I was as a kid to see the big red machine.
1. Freddie Blassie
That’s right, the man that Attitude Era fans remember as that lovely grandpa in the wheelchair that they would cart out whenever it was time to give an inspirational speech, is a wrestler that once created so much fear and outrage around his terrifying antics that he actually caused wrestling fans to die.
He was legitimately one of the most loathed heels in the history of wrestling, he got stabbed by fans, had acid thrown at him and his Cadillac was even torched by fans he’d driven out of their minds.
He wrestled throughout the 50s and 60s but reached the peak of his notoriety in Japan, where he would file his teeth down to sharp points and bite his opponents on the forehead, causing them to gush blood.
So the legends go, the sight of seeing this real-life gaijin vampire snacking on the head of their beloved hero Rikidozan caused several audience members to faint with shock, some to have a heart attack, and reportedly one to even pass away.
It’s a slightly different way of garnering heat to, say, insulting Seattle’s lack of a basketball team, but it’s no less effective.
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