There was a time when every promotion had a dark character with an occult or satanic storyline to amp up people’s fears and get over as a heel, and put over whoever the face across from them was. It was pretty standard, but had fallen out of favor as the WWE took over a majority of the wrestling world. But thanks to Bray Wyatt’s genius, his Wyatt family’s psychology may be influencing all levels of professional wrestling.
Yes, this is a broad ranging claim, but Wyatt and the WWE are as mainstream as it can get, so they’ll get the blame/credit in general despite smaller promotions continuing with dark characters during the PG Era. There’s no denying that over the last few years, there’s been an influx of dark psychology-based characters and storylines.
They’re everywhere
We’re all familiar with the Fiend and Wyatt’s history, including current WWE Universal Champion Braun Strowman being part of the Wyatt family, so this is where their part of the story ends. Directly, at least.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzmGF-w117k
Instead, we’re going to look at the wrestlers in various promotions that have had success with dark psychology. First, there’s WWE’s most prominent rival, AEW.
Here, we had the Dark Order led by Brodie Lee (Luke Harper), who has stated he’s always wanted to play an intelligent serial killer type of character but McMahon didn’t like that and kept him as a simple mid-card monster. There was also the Nightmare Collective that had so much potential before Awesome Kong’s injury/leaving to make a movie.
Impact Wrestling has Rosemary, Havoc, and Su Yung for their otherworldly dark storylines. There are others that are on the cusp or connect with it differently, but they’re the most prominent ones. Where the Wyatt family, Dark Order, and Nightmare Collective are cults, there are those that have taken on a more direct storyline, tying themselves to dark otherworldly powers and demons.
OVW (Ohio Valley Wrestling) has Amon, the devil’s favorite sinner who recently failed in an attempt to steal the soul of Ms. Marvelous.
Why the angles?
Part of it is we’re faced with a lot of bubblegum type of positivity in music and other areas, and not everyone wants or needs that constantly. We all like different things, and often times the antiheroes or villains are more fun to cheer.
But on a more psychological level, people tend to fear subjects like demons, devils, and cultish mentalities. They’re things we may not understand as well as tapping into our fear of being a power that can take us over and we can’t fight, hence we need someone that can conquer the evil.
This allows a promotion’s top face to grow and eventually topple the evil, much like John Cena beat Wyatt at WrestleMania 30 and Melvin Maximus defeated Amon to save Ms. Marvelous’ soul.
Whether it’s the Undertaker and Kane or Kevin Sullivan and Fallen Angel (Nancy Benoit), or the new crop of wrestlers, it’s standard good versus evil story that allows us to best our fears vicariously through a hero. It’s awesome work by everyone involved to get us to buy into it, and it’s something that never gets old no matter how many times we’ve seen it.
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