Every so often, Superstars arrive in a territory and immediately illicit sheer terror in the hearts of fans the world over. The Undertaker, Kane, and Bray Wyatt immediately come to mind as seriously scary characters you’d never want to meet in dark alleys anywhere. Other characters are meant to illicit that kind of response, but either the Superstar playing them or the character themselves couldn’t deliver on the promise of the premise.
Over the years, several wrestlers have come up with creepy, if not scary gimmicks - Waylon Mercy, Luna Vachon, Demolition, and The Road Warriors to name a few. But not all of these gimmicks live up to the task of actually being scary.
10 The Boogeyman
Marty Wright told a huge fib about his age to try and get onto the cast of the $1,000,000 Tough Enough. He was cut once the ruse was found out, but his gumption still earned him a tryout at OVW. He eventually started working as The Boogeyman.
Wright started stalking his way onto the main roster, eating worms and smashing clocks over his head. But once the veneer fell off, he was presented more as a comedy act - eating fake moles and even becoming accompanied by mini-version of himself. Reactions from the likes of Booker T didn’t help the horror facade, it only helped to serve up The Boogeyman as a comedy act.
9 Papa Shango
Charles Wright went into the WWE Hall Of Fame as The Godfather. But he went through several gimmicks to get there. His first big break in WWE came way back in early 1992 as the voodoo priest Papa Shango. He famously made his opponents go into convulsions, vomit, or even bleed black ooze.
But between The Ultimate Warrior feud going nowhere and Shango losing to Bret Hart at Saturday Night’s Main Event, the character was dropped from WWE TV after about a year before Wright returned as Kama.
8 Damien Demento
How many Superstars did The Undertaker make famous over the years? How many did he make famous just by having one monumental match with them. Damien Demento’s WWE run didn’t amount to much aside from hailing from the super creepy “Outer Reaches Of Your Mind”.
Demento got to headline the debut episode of Raw against The Deadman. Demento’s ginormous ring gear could have inspired fear should the WWE have booked him that way, but instead, Damien is mostly remembered for the aforementioned appearance.
7 Wrath & Mortis
For months, WCW had been running vignettes for something they were referring to as “Blood Runs Cold.” From a marketing standpoint, it wasn’t bad thought to try and parlay the success of the Mortal Kombat franchise into an angle for wrestling. Aside from Glacier debuting a little too late, debuting after nWo, thus rendering the outlandish storyline just that - outlandish.
Glacier’s two opponents, Wrath and Mortis would debut shortly after, and were supposed to be scary. But when Wrath was just a repackaged Adam Bomb and Mortis is Kanyon in disguise, the whole angle got silly fast, especially when Ernest Miller got involved.
6 Kevin Thorn
At 6’3 and 270 pounds, Kevin Thorn certainly had the look of a WWE Superstar. It also sounds like the statistics of someone who can be very intimidating for fans to look at. Thorn got not one but two opportunities to be scary. First as the all-white anti-Undertaker, Mordecai. He could condemn the fans for their sins and ask to join him in prayer. When that concept flopped, he was sent back to OVW before coming back to ECW as a vampire, along with Tarot card reader, Ariel, at his side. Neither gimmick took off nearly as well as first conceived, and Thorn was sent packing.
5 Isaac Yankem, DDS
It took several years for Glenn Jacobs to strike it really big as the terrifying monster Kane, but first he had to endure a string of bad gimmicks like being the fake Diesel and Jerry Lawler’s personal dentist, Isaac Yankem, DDS. Between the horrible teeth and crazy saws being used in the vignettes, and the influence of bad horror movies like Dr. Giggles had Yankem pegged to be an imposing and unstoppable heel.
However, he wound up being just another obstacle in Bret Hart’s way on the way to finally getting his hands on The King.
4 The Ascension
When teams like The Road Warriors, The Powers Of Pain, and Demolition walked the Earth, not only did they all paint their faces to look mean, they worked hard-hitting styles and were able strike fear and dread into their opponents no matter what promotion they were working for. The Ascension attempted to live up to that reputation in NXT and for the most part they did. But once they got to the main roster, they immediately called out those teams of yesteryear and got put in their place quickly. Any luster that was on the team got buried along with them.
3 Nailz
In a strange twist of fate (not the Hardys’ move), the story of the real life man who portrayed Nailz is far more interesting than anything the big man had done in the ring. Make no mistake however about how scary he was meant to be. This character is a former convict with a huge grudge to settle against the man who put him there - The Big Boss Man. Nailz even beat the heck out of Bossman with his own night stick on one occasion. However, instead of booking him any more heat, Nailz instead lost the big Nightstick On A Pole match at Survivor Series 1992. He was released in December of that year due to the scarier incident of threatening McMahon over his SummerSlam payoff and choking him out backstage.
2 Erick Rowan
All of the members of The Wyatt Family were certainly intended to be creepy, intimidating, and scary backwoods hillbillies. Unfortunately, they would wind up being perceived more of a joke than scary frightening men. Erick Rowan, after years of living down several bad iterations of his gimmick, seemingly finally had something, coming to the ring with a pet under a tarp and obliterating anyone that came near it.
However, after the big reveal of it being a big animatronic spider, and Drew McIntyre destroying it. Once again, any possibility of Rowan being a monster went out the window.
1 Kevin Sullivan
There is generally no argument that Kevin Sullivan is one of the best bookers of the late eighties and early nineties. He also somehow managed to be able to convince fans that he was the devil himself - just by putting on a few streaks of paint and acting like a wild man. While it might have worked for the territories, when he updated the character for WCW as The Taskmaster it seemed very hokey. That silliness didn’t change or get scarier when he added stranger and funnier looking characters to his stable like The Yeti or Z Gangsta.