In the final part of our series on The Fiend we take a look at how horror movies have influenced the character, from the design, to the shocks and scares he gives other wrestlers and even the way the matches have been structured!
Watch 'What Wrestling Matches without a Live Audience is Missing | Explained | PartsFUNknown' here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxfZ-ON7bI8
Thanks to Tom Beasley for talking to us!
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Watch 'What Wrestling Matches without a Live Audience is Missing | Explained | PartsFUNknown' here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxfZ-ON7bI8
Thanks to Tom Beasley for talking to us!
Follow him on Twitter: @TomJBeasley
Get the latest WrestleTalk Magazine here: https://bit.ly/2Xg8ms7
SUPPORT US ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/wrestletalk
SUBSCRIBE TO partsFUNknown: https://bit.ly/2J2Hl6q
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/partsfunknown
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/partsfunknown/
#partsfunknown #wrestling #WWE #AEW #explained #TheFiend #WresltingExplained
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SportsTranscript
00:00 A figure steps out of the swirling mist, a grinning maw looms from the shadows, pale
00:14 face illuminated by the sickly glow emanating from a macabre lantern, a severed head, eyes
00:20 sewn shut and gaping mouth producing a moonlit gleam that catches on wicked yellow irises.
00:29 During the slow march down the ramp, its next victim can only watch on as this figure of
00:34 dread draws nearer, the impending doom suspended only for a brief moment of pageantry, the
00:40 monster playing to the crowd, savouring the calm before the violence.
00:47 The Fiend's entrance is one thing that WWE and Bray Wyatt have absolutely nailed about
00:52 the character since its inception, whereas some of the other choices haven't exactly
00:56 landed like, I dunno, one that rhymes with Selena Hell.
01:01 But what was it that was so successful about that introduction to the character?
01:06 What made The Fiend's standout matches and moments truly sing or scream?
01:11 I think the answer is all in the execution.
01:15 I'm Laurie, hailing from partsFUNknown and this is The Fiend Explained.
01:33 Now I might be a little biased about this having made 40 minutes of video about this
01:37 subject alone in the last few weeks, but I genuinely believe that from the moment that
01:42 Mercy the Buzzard first popped out of that cardboard box all the way up to the bell at
01:46 the end of the Summerslam match against Finn Balor, we WWE fans were treated to one of
01:50 the most perfect character introductions of all time.
01:54 And it was wildly different to basically any other that I can think of, because we've
01:59 seen plenty of unannounced entries into matches, shocking attacks to close out shows, and we've
02:10 even seen our fair share of mysterious vignettes.
02:14 But none quite like the Firefly Funhouse.
02:17 Because one of the most intriguing things about Bray Wyatt's return to the WWE roster
02:21 was just how long it took for us to realise what was going on.
02:25 The puppets popped up in early April 2019, stalking members of the roster, but it wasn't
02:30 until later that month that Bray himself popped his noggin round the door of the Firefly Funhouse
02:35 and then we had an agonising wait of over three months before we saw The Fiend's debut
02:41 match.
02:42 And that delayed gratification, that slow drawing out of tension is something that comes
02:46 right out of horror films, because as each subsequent Funhouse took a darker and darker
02:51 turn, fans were left clamouring for answers.
02:54 Who would The Fiend be targeting, how would it attack and where does it come from?
03:00 And all the while your weekly scheduled Funhouse programming was slowly going off the rails,
03:04 twisted children's songs seeped in, muscle men dances made their debut, incongruous pentagrams
03:11 interspersed scenes and cartoon violence right out of Itchy and Scratchy ramped up.
03:17 RIP Rambling Rabbit, the Kenny of the modern era.
03:20 And yet it's somehow all hung together around Bray, his Mr Rogers character brilliantly
03:26 walking the line between cheerful, kid-friendly cardigan vibes and menacing monster lurking
03:32 beneath the surface.
03:36 It reminded me at points of Bill Skarsgård's excellent portrayal of Pennywise the Dancing
03:41 Clown in Andy Muschietti's version of It.
03:43 Here is a character completely capable of charming children into a false sense of security,
03:48 though that murderous intent, the slathering hunger is only ever suppressed slightly beneath
03:54 the surface.
04:03 Why wouldn't it be in Bray's grab bag of horror influences?
04:07 After all his last gimmick used to dub himself the Eater of Worlds, something Pennywise does
04:12 too.
04:21 And then you have the Fiend, because yeah sure the face may be stretched and wrenched
04:25 into this monstrous visage, but the clownish influences are certainly there.
04:30 And what better look for the Fiend to take, because if the Firefly Funhouse is some sort
04:34 of corrupted children's TV show, then the demonic clown that haunts its halls is the
04:40 perfect monster.
04:41 As Stephen King himself said when explaining why it takes the form of Pennywise in the
04:46 first place, "Clowns scare children more than anything else in the world."
04:51 I don't think it's just children, because as Pennywise has proven, clowns can creep
04:55 out just about anyone.
04:57 And they have a rich history of doing so, from the Phantom Clowns of the 1980s to John
05:02 Wayne Gacy, who regularly performed at children's hospitals and charity events as Pogo the Clown,
05:07 to that weird global clown trend of 2016 where costume creeps would peer in windows at night
05:13 and try to lure people off into the woods.
05:16 All of them have kind of captured the public's imagination in much the same way.
05:20 But even without brandishing a knife or looming at windows, there is something about clowns
05:26 that many people find unsettling.
05:28 Registered psychologist Dr Rami Nader told Time that the reason for this might be that
05:33 "Clowns' faces are disguised and they have these artificial displays of emotion.
05:38 So you have a clown with a painted face and a big smile, but you don't really know what
05:43 they're actually feeling.
05:45 There's this inherent mistrust that what they're presenting you isn't what they're actually
05:49 feeling."
05:50 And that's clearly the case for the Fiend, a character with a menacing grin plastered
05:54 across his face, but one clearly suffering from some unseen inner turmoil.
05:59 A conflict between the opposing forces of hurt and heal.
06:03 Rey struggling to reconcile the man with a wounded ego with the monster out for revenge.
06:09 The Fiend smiles in inappropriate situations, laughs as it injures much like the scary clowns
06:15 of cinema history as freelance wrestling and film journalist Tom Beasley told me when I
06:20 spoke to him.
06:21 "You mentioned in one of the other videos the Joker stuff and it goes back to Conrad
06:26 Verne and the man who laughs.
06:27 So the early influences of the Joker, that's all there in the Fiend mask.
06:30 And I was watching some clips from the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari before this, which is the
06:35 classic silent film where you have this sort of malevolent circus impresario who sends
06:41 out this big hulking guy, Caesar, whose face resembles the Fiend mask in some ways, sends
06:46 him out to do his dirty bidding.
06:48 And essentially you've got there Funhouse Grey and Fiend Brett.
06:52 There's lots of interesting stuff going on.
06:54 But yeah, the one that struck me was Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
06:57 And I like to think that Bray Wyatt, the man, is very interested in German expressionist
07:01 cinema of the 1920s."
07:02 Both the figure of Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs and Caesar in the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
07:07 spend time as fairground attractions.
07:10 A novel little wrinkle to The Fiend's inspirational lineage as pro wrestling itself has its roots
07:15 in the carnivals and funfairs of the 1800s in America.
07:19 Both they and The Fiend stand as a stark reminder that people are often fascinated by things
07:23 that unsettle us.
07:24 I mean, how else are you going to explain my obsession with Love is Blind?
07:27 But a masked man striking without warning and then disappearing off into the darkness
07:32 has inspirations from much more recent horror cinema.
07:41 So straightforwardly, he's a slasher villain.
07:44 That's the kind of the core of it.
07:45 He's a Freddy Krueger.
07:46 He's a Jason Voorhees.
07:47 He's a Michael Myers.
07:48 That SummerSlam match with Finn Balor is essentially the opening quote unquote kill of any slasher
07:54 movie.
07:55 It's, you know, the stalk and slash sequence where ultimately he takes over them.
07:59 Tom's right, that match from SummerSlam 2019 definitely feels like it could be a deleted
08:03 scene from one of the Friday the 13th or Halloween films.
08:07 The unsuspecting Finn Balor, who is funnily enough dressed in white to give him +10 innocence,
08:12 is confronted by a monster.
08:14 The confident, extraordinary man who called out Bray a few weeks earlier is nowhere to
08:19 be found as Smallin' Finn Balor is mauled and dominated by a beast.
08:26 The Fiend just absolutely toys with Finn, torturing him with move after move and never
08:31 going for the pin until the last moment, until he's already dead.
08:36 Unlike all good stalk and slash scenes, there's that brief moment of hope as Balor fights
08:40 back, seeming like he might escape, but the Fiend leaps to his feet, locking in the mandible
08:45 claw which plays brilliantly off Bray's surprising mobility for a bigger guy, but
08:50 also mimicking the way a character like Jason can seemingly close the distance in the blink
08:55 of an eye.
08:56 A horror movie trope so burnt into popular culture that they made it a mechanic in the
09:00 Friday the 13th game for players controlling the violent Voorhees.
09:04 Now admittedly it wasn't exactly great for Finn Balor to become the disposable teenager
09:09 for the Fiend to just handily dispatch, but like all good horror films there was a hidden
09:14 motive behind this seemingly random murder.
09:17 Balor had bested Bray Wyatt at Summerslam two years prior, bringing out the Demon King
09:23 to face down the Eater of Worlds and walking out with a W.
09:27 So this, as most people have worked out by now, was technically a mission of revenge
09:32 and it's one the Fiend has been following up on for the most part ever since.
09:37 Because the next in line was perhaps a contentious choice of target, Seth Rollins, the then Universal
09:43 Champion.
09:44 What followed were a series of bumps in the night that left Seth shaken as Doomsday approached.
09:50 A hell in a cell at the eponymous pay-per-view.
09:53 Now loads has already been said about whether this was the time to hot shot Bray into the
09:58 title picture or whether that closing moment made in an effort to protect both guys was
10:03 the right decision, so I'll try not to dwell on that too much.
10:07 But what I do find interesting about this match is how the entire tone screamed horror
10:13 movie.
10:18 Because this was the finale of a slasher film told through the medium of a wrestling match.
10:23 The Fiend, this mysterious figure with enigmatic motives, has slowly torn through legends and
10:28 members of the roster while simultaneously tormenting Seth Rollins.
10:32 Now the pair are trapped together, substituting the haunted cabin in the woods or the power
10:37 outage suburban mansion for a chain-mesh cage bathed in garish red light.
10:43 There is nowhere for Rollins to run to as The Fiend begins to toy with him, so soon
10:49 Seth realises he has no choice but to fight back.
10:53 He lashes out with every weapon to hand but to no avail.
10:57 The creature just shrugs off blows that would down a normal man.
11:01 And even when he does topple, he just gets right back up, he just keeps coming.
11:09 By the end of the match Rollins isn't trying to win, he's trying to kill in order to
11:14 survive, he's sinking to increasingly violent depths in order to do so.
11:19 And as Vic Joseph said on commentary before the match, Seth enters Hell in a Cell with
11:23 the realisation that he will not be the same upon leaving it.
11:27 And this is a common theme for the protagonist of any horror movie, that final life or death
11:32 struggle snaps something in them that can't easily be mended.
11:37 You know that Hell in a Cell match, you have Seth Rollins repeatedly beating on The Fiend
11:45 with everything he can get his hands on and that is very reminiscent of the final acts
11:50 of any slasher movie.
11:51 The difference I think is, and the reason why that match perhaps didn't work, is that
11:55 in a slasher movie no one comes in and says "right that's enough, don't kill him".
11:59 Dr Loomis didn't run in at the end of Halloween and instead of shooting Michael go "right
12:03 that's enough, we're done with him now".
12:06 If you're in an athletic competition and a man is at risk of death, you have to stop
12:10 the athletic competition.
12:11 But if you're in a fight to the death with a slasher villain, you don't stop until the
12:16 slasher villain has been vanquished.
12:18 And then of course after that match we got the classic slasher villain one more scare
12:22 thing, where he rose from seeming death to choke out Seth Rollins in crowd pleasingly
12:28 gory fashion.
12:29 I know I said I wouldn't dwell on it, but in for a penny, in for a pound.
12:33 Because I think Tom makes a good point about why the stoppage in that match wasn't the
12:37 right choice.
12:38 And that's for a few reasons.
12:39 First and foremost because for all I'm saying that this is a horror film and that The Fiend
12:43 is a bad guy, to many WWE fans he's the protagonist, they're rooting for him, they
12:48 want to see him succeed where WWE forced him to fail years ago.
12:54 Because he's different, because he brings something fresh and exciting to the table,
12:59 something that's as gruesome and schlocky as a slasher film but has had a lot of thought
13:04 go into it.
13:05 It's not a case of all the fear and no idea.
13:09 And the second reason that stoppage doesn't work is because The Fiend isn't some sort
13:13 of transgressive anomaly in WWE.
13:16 Yes, in horror films Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees are serial killers, they operate
13:22 outside the bounds of polite society.
13:25 In WWE every motherfucker with an axe to grind is kicking somebody else in the head about
13:29 it.
13:30 So frankly Bray choosing to wear a mask and take down the people who held him down in
13:34 previous years isn't exactly some sort of heinous act is it?
13:38 But then maybe that's a little bit too meta.
13:40 Because I think the third reason and the real reason the Rollins and The Fiend/Helena Sell
13:44 match didn't work is because it came too early in the horror film.
13:48 We'd seen Bray dispatch Finn Balor with an efficient flick at the wrist and take down
13:52 legends like Mick Foley and Jerry Lawler, but that wasn't enough.
13:57 Because slasher villains often tear through entire towns, they are the number one cause
14:01 of sorority collapse.
14:03 You pile up the bodies until one survivor is left standing.
14:07 The final girl.
14:13 The term was coined by film scholar Carol Clother in her 1987 essay Her Body, Himself,
14:19 Gender in the Slasher Film, which described the sole survivor of these murder sprees as
14:23 someone with an astonishing will to survive.
14:27 She alone looks death in the face, but she alone also finds the strength either to stay
14:32 the killer long enough to be rescued, or to kill him herself.
14:37 In WWE terms running isn't really an option for a top babyface, so the only option on
14:41 the table for our final girl Seth Rollins is to sink to the Fiends level.
14:47 "You mentioned the final girl who sort of chooses to stop running and to turn around
14:51 and engage in the violence and there's lots of really good writing in that over the years.
14:55 Carol Clover's Men, Women and Chainsaws is one of the best books written about horror
14:59 cinema and that is all about turning the weapon of assault on the killer and we've almost
15:05 seen some of that in the Fiends story.
15:07 The way Finn Balor's character changed after he fought the Fiends, Daniel Bryan's character
15:13 changed after he fought the Fiends."
15:15 A lot of the turning the weapon of assault chat that comes out of film studies is based
15:19 on the obvious phallic imagery of the knife wielding male killer and the nubile female
15:23 victims, the impotence and violence with a little bit of Freudian alzia, father or should
15:28 that be mother thrown in.
15:29 That is not what is happening here.
15:31 Though I do think Carol Clovers would have a field day with the homoerotic undertones
15:35 of two deep heat slathered lads just straight up gripping and grappling.
15:40 What did happen at Hell in a Cell was Seth Rollins turned his attacker's weapon of choice
15:44 against him.
15:45 As Clover puts it, Seth addresses the killer on his own terms.
15:50 Because the Fiend has this crazy Harley Quinn inspired mallet hidden away under the ring
15:54 and puts it to good use throughout the match and Rollins brings out a sledgehammer.
16:00 If we're comparing sizes then Rollins absolutely pales in comparison to Wyatt's but what's
16:06 that King?
16:07 There's some kind of thematic link between the two.
16:09 And then also you've got the fact that Seth using a sledge, the weapon of Triple H, the
16:13 King he slayed, is actually quite poetic when you think about it.
16:16 Becoming the thing you hate and all of that.
16:18 So yeah, like a final girl, Seth meets the monster on its level and goes to a place that
16:23 changes him in order to vanquish that foe.
16:26 The only problem is, he didn't bring the audience along with him.
16:30 Because normally in the slasher genre the audience tend to revel in the violence, enjoying
16:35 the thrill of each kill along with the antagonist right up until the very end.
16:40 Clover said, "Observers unanimously stress the readiness of the 'live' audience to switch
16:45 sympathies in midstream, siding now with the killer and now, and finally, with the final
16:50 girl."
16:51 And it feels like Halloween, this switching of allegiances is even shown on screen, as
16:56 the opening scenes have us peering through the eyes of Michael Myers, while towards the
17:00 end we're the ones trapped in the closet with Jamie Lee Curtis' character Laurie
17:04 as Michael smashes through the door.
17:08 For Rollins sadly there was no moment during that match where the audience properly started
17:12 to side with him.
17:13 The Fiend was this hot new commodity in WWE and people hadn't tired of watching him cut
17:17 a path of destruction through the entire roster.
17:20 Now Daniel Bryan came a lot closer to being The Fiend's final girl in his matches against
17:24 him at Survivor Series and the Royal Rumble, turning the audience to his side with a gutsy
17:28 performance but no doubt helped along by his position as the company's all-time underdog.
17:35 But the failure of Rollins vs The Fiend wasn't exactly the fault of either man that night,
17:39 just of WWE's desire to have the popular Spooky Man do the spooky match at the Spooky
17:43 Pay-Per-View.
17:44 Because funnily enough even that fits into the horror movie mold, to borrow another term
17:49 from Clover, the Hell in a Cell is your archetypical terrible place, the battleground for the final
17:55 confrontation between our hero and the monster.
17:59 Their match at Crown Jewel also happened in a terrible place, but that is more of a political
18:03 thing.
18:07 One other terrible place in all but name is the Firefly Funhouse from WrestleMania 36.
18:12 I don't know about you but I was expecting some sort of House of Horrors redux episode
18:17 but what we actually got was a weird existential version of This is Your Life.
18:21 But even this mindf*****g arium is cut from slasher cloth.
18:25 "Firefly Funhouse is a Freddy Krueger dreamscape.
18:28 One of the things that I think makes Elm Street perhaps the best of the big slasher franchises
18:33 is it doesn't root itself in the real world, even in the first one and certainly by the
18:37 time you get to Dream Warriors and other ones.
18:40 So much of it's happening within the dreamscape and Freddy Krueger has the ability to manipulate
18:45 that dreamscape, which is exactly what we saw Bray Wyatt do with the Funhouse.
18:50 Whenever it seemed as if Cena was getting a foothold, the world would change, the scene
18:55 would change and again he'd be on the back foot.
18:58 And that's something that the Freddy Krueger character can do.
19:01 He has the power to move the goalposts constantly in order to keep the heroes off the pace and
19:08 I think that's exactly what Firefly Funhouse was."
19:10 Because the match, if you could really call it that, was basically a psychological assault
19:15 on John Cena, both the wrestling character and the man underneath.
19:19 To go back to my earlier comparisons to Pennywise the Dancing Clown, this was more like Bray
19:25 tormenting John with his worst fears.
19:28 That he was almost a failure, that his rise to be the top babyface in the company was
19:32 built on putting and keeping other people down, that he had become just as bad as the
19:38 old guys he used to rail against.
19:40 Because Pennywise confronts the children of Videri with their worst fears, one, in order
19:45 to make them taste better and two, to halt the Losers Club's attempts at stopping him.
19:50 And this is exactly what Bray is doing, he's hitting John Cena where it hurts in order
19:54 to exact his revenge, so he can throw him off his game, so he can make one of his arch-nemeses,
20:00 John Cena, disappear.
20:02 One thing to quickly end on is that the shifting dreamscape of the Funhouse allows Bray to
20:06 break the fourth wall of wrestling, to mix shoot and work into one cohesive whole, to
20:12 comment on his career, the company and his position within it as he goes.
20:18 Not only is this self-referential style typical of horror films, see Scream or Cabin in the
20:23 Woods, but it's also another link to the legacy of clowns.
20:27 Frank T. McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College, said that the very first
20:31 clowns were the court jesters who poked fun at kings and made people in high places uncomfortable.
20:38 And here's Bray gallivanting around in a clown mask, or with a creepy smile plastered
20:42 across his face as he exposes the business and pokes fun at Mr. McBossman.
20:47 And weirdly, this is the thing that's getting the character over.
20:50 Because though the fickle mistress of WWE booking has seemingly got in the way of the
20:55 horror movie that Bray has been telling, every bump in the road has turned into a bump in
21:00 the night and seemingly been incorporated in the story.
21:03 Which is one of the things I've loved about doing this series so far, because the more
21:06 you dig, the more stuff turns up.
21:09 Which is also the reason they haven't renovated the Sawyer family garden.
21:12 And while it's probably a bit of a reach to say that every link I've made or reference
21:16 I've gone over in this video was put there intentionally by Bray, what I think is so
21:21 cool about the character and Bray the man himself is that I wouldn't put it past him.
21:29 Thank you for watching, that's all I have on the Fiend for now.
21:38 If you enjoyed this video or the other two parts of this short series on the character,
21:43 please share them around with anyone you think might enjoy them as it really helps us out.
21:48 And let me know in the comments down below what other wrestling characters, match types
21:51 or secrets of the business you would like to see get the explained treatment.
21:55 I'll see you on your next trip to partsFUNknown.