When Wyatt wasn’t wearing his red sweater or Firefly Funhouse regalia, he was wearing his masked alter ego, The Fiend. With a terrifying face created by none other than horror legend Tom Savini, The Fiend felt like something straight out of a nightmare. Carrying a severed head lantern reminiscent of Wyatt’s cult leader persona, he arrived at a twisted metal shell of his old opening music. He wore gloves that said “HEAL/HURT” across his knuckles, and replica costume masks often sold out in WWE because people were instantly obsessed with the look. To add to The Fiend’s terror, he performed one of the most devastating moves in all of wrestling – the Mandible Claw.
Popularized by Mick Foley’s wrestling personality Mankind, the Mandible Claw depicts a wrestler putting his hands in his opponent’s mouth and tucking his fingers under his tongue while his thumb or palm pushes up the outside of the jaw. If you do it right, you can make someone faint. It’s intimate, it’s gross, and it’s terrifying to watch in action, making it the perfect move for the unstoppable Fiend. To add to the horror, The Fiend often fought their fights in red light to throw people off rhythm and bathe the audience in crimson light.
When The Fiend became the WWE Universal Champion, Savinis Studio was once again tasked with designing a championship belt, completely ignoring the conventions of a large, gold faceplate…and instead designing a literal faceplate based on the mask. It was as if The Fiend had his own stretched flesh around his waist and looked like something out of a Rob Zombie movie. Considering Zombies’ most famous horror film creation is the Firefly family from House of 1,000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects, and 3 From Hell, it’s fitting that the man who used to walk among the fireflies would experience similar horrors expressed.
Source : www.slashfilm.com