While Bray Wyatt remains popular with the WWE audience at large and continues to be given showcase spots on television, his antics have been steadily turning off hardcore fans for a while now. Many fans are irked at his failure to ever really win any meaningful feuds or matches, but a lot of people are also rankled by his spooky antics, be they maggot-projected rings, horror-filled houses, or just your standard creepy-voiced kid, hologram lantern or exploding television monitor.
(Boy, Bray Wyatt sure has had a lot of memorable moments in his few years on the main roster, hasn’t he?)
But it’s possible that Wyatt’s theatrics and insistence upon being spooky above all else might have its roots in one of the first wrestling storylines he ever fell in love with … one that is pretty infamous in its own right. During a recent appearance on Sam Roberts’ wrestling podcast, Wyatt talked about his love of horror and the macabre, and the voodoo villain who brought it all together. (Transcript via Wrestling Inc.)
“I’ve always been a huge fan of horror movies. I like the feeling of the thrill and I’ve always been attached to those movies, so naturally, the progression was once I started watching wrestling, it was the characters that always caught my eye. Like, one of my earliest memories of this was Papa Shango and The Ultimate Warrior and Papa Shango having the nasty black ooze coming at Ultimate Warrior with the voodoo. And I think that’s the type of stuff that really sticks in my head.”
It’s very possible that a tiny (perhaps clad in husky jeans) Bray Wyatt saw Ultimate Warrior gushing goo from the head and barfing on EMTs and he’s been chasing that spooky dragon ever since. Regardless of how history has viewed that feud, there’s no denying that an upchucking Ultimate Warrior left a pretty big mark on children who watched those segments. It’s just that very few of us have been in a position to make that aesthetic into our entire professional careers. Kudos to Bray Wyatt for chasing his bliss.
