The Fiend debuts at SummerSlam and is our creepy new best friend

It’s taken since WrestleMania, but we finally got a taste of what the new Bray Wyatt is all about in the ring at SummerSlam.

At SummerSlam on Sunday, Bray Wyatt faced a white-clad Finn Balor as The Fiend, perhaps the scariest persona/character/alter-ego in professional wrestling today. We’d seen The Fiend before; he’d been introduced as Wyatt’s dark side on Wyatt’s Firefly Fun House twisted children’s show, he’d attacked Balor, he’d attacked a pair of legends in Mick Foley and Kurt Angle. But he had yet to have a match or a proper entrance.

Wyatt, WWE and horror legend Tom Savini and his team had clearly created a creepy character, but until Sunday we had no idea just how creepy things could get. Wyatt’s entrance theme has been reimagined, turned darker, slower, more metal. He still carried a lantern but this one was made out of his own head. And the mask — it’s one thing to experience it in vignette form, as we have, or in small doses in the aforementioned attacks. It’s another to see it worn through an entire wrestling match. It’s scary stuff, nightmare fuel and something completely different from anything going on in WWE or pro wrestling in general at the present.

His in-ring work also showed some subtle cues about how The Fiend and the Mr. Rogers-style Wyatt are still competing over the same brain; he nearly put away Balor with Sister Abigail but begged himself off, struggling with the decision (remember, Fun House Wyatt has admitted to being a big Balor fan). This allowed Balor an opening for some offense of his own, and that act of aggression took us back from Wyatt to The Fiend, and thus to the mandible claw and The Fiend winning.

The question is, obviously, where we go from here. A push to the moon seems imminent (or underway) given the sheer volume of Wyatt, Fiend and Fun House merch being peddled at the WWE Shop, but there is always the risk of overexposure or of the entire gimmick — Wyatt, Fun House, Fiend — being so chopped and screwed by creative that it loses its edge, as we’ve seen with Wyatt’s past incarnations and storylines. The Fiend character itself seems destined for special occasions only, like Balor’s Demon King, but even the Demon has become toothless in both its lack of and choice of usage.

But there’s no doubt that Wyatt needs a new foe, with Balor vanquished (and taking an extended vacation). The good news is that WWE doesn’t seem to have an issue with slow-playing the entire character. It’s been four months between the Fun House’s first episode and SummerSlam, and while his next match shouldn’t be four months in the making, coming up with a new feud doesn’t have to be an instantaneous pivot to that person. And even if we don’t get a true foil for Wyatt in the short term, we can still (hopefully) enjoy The Fiend’s random attacks and a return to the Firefly Fun House segments, should that be the plan instead.

Regardless of the direction Wyatt and The Fiend goes, it’s hard to criticize the direction it has taken thus far. There’s no doubt what he’s conjured up with the WWE is unique and the crowd reaction on Sunday in particular (and the reaction on Twitter and the reaction in your humble writer’s living room) proved how astounding the whole presentation is in person or viewed as a whole.

Granted, it’s hard not to love what Wyatt is up to, which in turn makes it hard to view him as a heel or a monster. Or at least it makes it hard to react to him as a heel when he does heel things, because the whole thing is just so creepy that it’s cool and so cool that it’s creepy. That will likely be one of the biggest challenges with the character and one hopefully they’ve done some advance planning for, because it could be easy to neuter the effectiveness of The Fiend simply by loving him too much. Which, in a sense, is poetic given the storyline of Fun House Wyatt and his Fiend alter-ego.

Ultimately, all we can do is wait and see what Wyatt and WWE have planned for the character and the story moving forward and hope for the best. In the meanwhile, we have a thoroughly creepy memory from SummerSlam burned into our brains, a new monster to haunt us in our sleep, a mask perfect for Halloween ready for purchase and the pleasure of experiencing one of the most unique minds in professional wrestling create and present one of its most unique characters. We’re really glad.