The Oversaturation of ‘Spooky’ Wrestling Gimmicks

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(Originally written on July 24th, 2024)

I’ve noticed a trend recently in wrestling. There seems to be a very gradual influx of wrestlers with lore based ‘spooky’ gimmicks.

I want to cover my bases and say that I do think lore based gimmicks 100% have their place in professional wrestling. They make space for innovation, exploration and challenge viewers and fans alike to question why they are the way that they are. Take The Undertaker. While I personally think he’s an incredibly overrated wrestler and an okay character at best, the depth and general uniqueness he brought to wrestling when the gimmick debuted made him immediately stand out. He was a shot of ink in the milk that would pose an immediate threat to any of the zany characters of the early to mid 90s.

For me the best examples of this are Bray Wyatt and Malakai Black. Bray was a man who took on several ideas in his time, whether that be deranged cult leader out of the bayou, a kid’s TV show host with a twisted secret, or a regular man trying to deal with the ghosts of his past who had manifested into physical form. Particularly with his Wyatt6 and Fiend interpretations of himself, it felt like everything he did posed an extra question about the character. Was the Fiend a manifestation of all the torment Bray had gone through in previous years? Was Uncle Howdy the same for his brother Bo? Was Sister Abigail ever real, or just a figment of Bray’s imagination that he looked to for salvation?

Malakai on the other hand might just be one of my favourite characters in all of wrestling. It helps that he’s one of my favourite wrestlers of all time, but the whole aesthetic and character just reaches for every part of my heart. He speaks in relative tongues and riddles but there’s something so unsettling about it. We KNOW Malakai is human, he’s shown weakness and human tendencies at various points in the past 3 years since his AEW debut, for example times when his mist would backfire on him when Penta held his mouth shut as he went to spit it, or several losses proving he is capable of being beaten. But there’s something beyond human about Malakai; we’ve never got a true explanation about what the deal is with his right eye. Sure, you could tie it back to him having his eye stabbed with a steel step in 2020, but as far as I know wounded eyes don’t tend to have black & white decay sprouting from them as time goes by, nor does a regular human have the ability to spit a corrupting black mist that overtime, will warp bubbly cheerleaders to become witches with cool hats & also developing said mist-ical abilities. Hell, Malakai’s so influential that he’s even spawned blatant rip-offs on the independent scene (hello Alexander Crowley).

My overarching point is that lore does absolutely have its place in wrestling. If given the chance to properly explore it, it helps to flesh out characters and gives everyone a sense of distinct individuality. My problem comes in the amount of people doing it.

Less is more when it comes to the lore. When everyone starts doing the ‘I have a dark side’ schtick or teleporting during hypersonic power cuts or spitting mist, everything feels incredibly diluted. You can try your hardest to add your own flavours and elements to the character, but eventually everything melts together to become an overdone character. It also doesn’t help when the people doing the gimmicks are already really good as they are without the gimmicks.

TJP and Lio Rush are 2 men who have incorporated ‘dark sides’ into their characters when they really didn’t need to. TJP debuted his ‘Aswang’ character at Wrestle Kingdom 18 this year, after having been shoved in a coffin a few weeks earlier by the BC War Dogs. The Aswang is a character actually rooted in folklore from TJP’s home nation of the Philippines. According to mythology.net, an Aswang is a shapeshifting nocturnal monster that while appearing as a regular human during the day, shifts to a form comparable to a dog, pig or bird at night, and scours the rural villages for fleshy pray, opting to normally go for pregnant women or children.

I think rooting a character in legitimate folklore is actually a really cool thing to do. Finn Balor did the same thing when he incorporated his ‘Demon’ other side to have roots in irish mythology, and while you could argue it was unnecessary as the idea of it just being ‘war paint’ worked enough, I think it helped differentiate him at a time in mid 2010’s WWE where there really wasn’t much of that at all. The problem then comes in the fact that TJP is not cool, and Finn is. Finn is effortlessly cool, carries himself with a distinct swagger, wears cool jackets and has a genuine connection with the crowd. TJP on the other hand, while a very reliable worker, is painfully uncool. His role as the ‘cool dad’ going through a midlife crisis in the United Empire means that his Aswang gimmick stands out in the absolute worst way, and I don’t think it’s really doing him any favours whatsoever.

I legitimately think that if it was someone else doing the Aswang gimmick, say a Filipino indie wrestler, it’d be awesome as that would stand out in a sea of indie wrestlers having little to no differentiation outside of how they treat people. But TJP doing it, combined with his insistence on being the UE’s captain & his pseudo-openweight status on top of his base character feels like he’s doing too much at once and nothing works at all. The United Empire is meant to be a conglomerate of the best wrestlers in the world all representing different nations to achieve global domination, and then suddenly there’s a beast from Filipino folklore in the ranks and it messes with the vibe. The character is good in concept, but in execution it’s completely the wrong guy doing it.

And then we get to Lio Rush and his ‘Blackheart’. I believe the Blackheart recently died in canon thanks to Amazing Red stabbing the source of it’s powers with a wrench, but the Blackheart was a fucking weird gimmick. To summarise it, imagine the Cheshire Cat was drawn in grayscale and possessed one of the most fun to watch wrestlers in wrestling by means of a literal black heart with a rope connecting it like a pendant that Lio would drink out of. That’s the best I got.

Lio Rush is one of the best junior heavyweight wrestlers in the world bell to bell for me. He’s incredibly pacey, naturally charismatic, a solid talker, all the tools you could ask for. So what the fuck was he doing with the Blackheart? Oh I forgot to mention that the Blackheart would freeze anyone if it was around their neck unless it was around Lio’s. I don’t know either. I get wanting to try something new after years of being pretty much the same character but doing a spooky gimmick in a time where spooky gimmicks are very much a done thing made the Blackheart feel more like a punchline than it did a poltergeist. It felt corny with the sudden changes in cadence, the rye smiling, the cat-pouncing around the ring (I actually thought that was quite cool), ultimately if Lio just was Lio all the time, he’d get more over because he’s Lio pissing Rush and he’s fantastic.

To wrap this up, I do think 2024 has been the year of the oversaturation of the lore gimmick. With the debut of the WyattSicks, Malakai having been around for 3 years with not much character explanation and the completely flat executions of the Aswang and the Blackheart, even as a lore fiend myself, I feel like wrestling as whole could go at least a year without another major company trying to pull off a lore based gimmick.