Danhausen says the oddball wrestling character fans know today began as something much darker. In a May 2022 interview, he said he decided in 2017, when he was ready to quit wrestling, to try one more time by going all in on a horror figure that was never meant to be funny.

“Like full on evil, no nice part of it. I was just straight up horror movie,” he said of the early version of the gimmick. He said the look came from the films he grew up on, starting with Hellraiser, the 1987 Clive Barker film, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, released in 1973 and directed by Tobe Hooper. He also pointed to John Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live, saying, “I did a They Live makeup one time. I think that’s what I started with.”

That version did not last. Danhausen said he eventually landed on the Pazuzu makeup from The Exorcist for a Halloween party, then tried to morph it into something that felt like his own. He said that look stuck because it was the easiest and quickest to do, and because people had started drawing that makeup on him. That is the version that became part of his rise, even though it began as a far darker idea than the one fans now cheer.

The contrast matters because Danhausen’s current popularity is built on a character that started as a serious horror project before it was pushed toward something more playful and recognizable. The interview came a few months after he signed with AEW, and it also landed after a separate wrestling moment that showed how much the gimmick had already spread: at Backlash, he went into a tag team match with a promised mystery partner, and many in the audience expected CM Punk before a little person emerged instead.

What Danhausen described is the path of a character that survived because he kept adjusting it until it clicked. The answer to why it worked is already in his own account: he did not begin by trying to be a joke. He began by trying to be a horror movie, and the image people now associate with him came from that exact decision.