Ghoulish Grapplers & Monstrous Matmen - Wrestling in the Spooky Season
My dudes, it is the Spooky Season. By which I mean it’s the second week of October, and there’s only the slimmest of chances that I’ll remember to put a Halloween costume together this year, so in lieu of that, I figured I would give you a tangentially themed bit of wrestling writing instead, and take a look at what happens when horror icons step into the wrestling ring.
Vampires
Anyone familiar with Attitude Era WWF knows that, in the parlance of Edge’s infamously terrible promo, “beware, take care, because the freaks come out at night”. Whether Mr. Copeland’s attempt to introduce himself was consciously echoing original screen Dracula Bela Lugosi’s introduction to Ed Wood’s ode to cross-dressing, Glen Or Glenda, is a mystery, but we do know that while Edge himself may not have been a Dracula, he was at least Dracula-adjacent, thanks to his part as one third of spooky goth boy trio The Brood, alongside Christian and Gangrel. Gangrel, known prior to his WWF stint as The Vampire Warrior, is perhaps wrestling’s best known vampire, thanks to appearing at the height of one of American wrestling’s biggest boom periods, and having the coolest entrance in wrestling history.
And, as anyone who saw the opening credits to WWF video games in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s could tell you, Gangrel was a registered trademark of White Wolf Inc. - the makers of the hugely influential RPG Vampire: The Masquerade. In the world of VTM, the Gangrel - from the Middle English for drifter or vagabond - were a clan of nomadic, animalistic vampires, whose bestial tendencies left them struggling to disguise themselves among humans in the manner of their more sophisticated brethren. David Heath, the WWF’s Gangrel, didn’t really fit that monstrous bill, and owed more to the vampire novels of Anne Rice, and the 1994 film adaptation of Interview With The Vampire, which perhaps explained his and his Brood-mates penchant for puffy pirate shirts.
Rumour had it Gangrel was due a comeback in 2006 for WWE’s relaunch of ECW, to work alongside the new vampire on the block, Kevin Thorn, allegedly the brainchild of Paul Heyman when he realised that “vampires were going to be big business”, and something of a conceit to ECW’s TV network, the SciFi Channel, who wanted suitably fantastical characters on their programming. While Kevin Thorn was anything but big business, it’s hard to argue with Heyman’s assessment on the coming marketability of vampire content - the first Twilight movie came two years after Thorn’s debut, as did the True Blood TV series.
Given that Gangrel’s heyday was in the late ‘90s and at the height of the Monday Night Wars, WCW decided that if the WWF had vampires, they needed to have a bloodsucker too, and they turned to one Ian Hodgkinson, alias Vampiro. It has to be said that Vampiro’s persona pre-WCW was always one that lent into the gothic end of glam rock, and was not meant to be interpreted as an actual, literal vampire - a former bodyguard for Milli Vanilli, the Canadian Vampiro began his career in Mexico, where he became a near instant success, his combination of good looks and tattooed, long-haired, heavy metal bad boy gimmick were revolutionary at a time when state and local government all but outlawed rock and roll music; Vampiro may as well have dropped into Mexico City from another planet as from Thunder Bay, Ontario. His success in Mexico was astronomical, becoming one of the biggest names in Lucha Libre, a crossover star with his own band, regular TV appearances, film roles, and all the trappings of success, which didn’t endear him to other luchadores who felt he hadn’t earned his position atop the card. Like many luchadores, the late ‘90s crash of the Peso led him to WCW, where ex-WWF writer Vince Russo saw in him an opportunity to rehash some of the hackier, horror B-movie inspired aspects of the success of The Undertaker and Kane’s feud in the WWF, pairing Vampiro with Sting in everything from Human Torch matches - where the object was to set one’s opponent on fire - and brawls in graveyards. Leaning heavily on his connections in the alternative music sphere, Vampiro owns the dubious distinction of being the only wrestler to have tagged with both the Insane Clown Posse and horror rock icons The Misfits, who were brought in to WCW as his running buddies.
It’s little surprise that one of wrestling’s most preeminent vampires (I know I just said he wasn’t really a vampire, but bear with me, this is already a paper-thin premise for a post) came from the world of Lucha Libre, as lucha’s silver screen outings suggest that Mexican wrestling is absolutely rife with bloodsuckers - in 1962, cinemagoers were treated to El Santo Vs. The Vampire Women, followed by 1965’s Baron Brakola and 1968’s Dracula’s Treasure (both also starring Santo), in 1969 it was Santo & Blue Demon Vs. The Monsters (in which the titular heroes do battle not just with vampires, but also a wolfman, cyclops, Frankenstein’s monster, evil clones, and a mummy - it’s an absolute delight), in 1970 our hero had to contend with The Revenge Of The Vampire Women, in 1972 Blue Demon and Santo once again paired up, this time to take on Dracula & The Wolf-Man, while in 1981 his son El Hijo Del Santo paired up with Chanoc against The Killer Vampires, and Blue Demon went it alone for 1968’s The Shadow Of The Bat. Never one to want to miss his turn in the spotlight, it was Mil Mascaras’ turn to battle the living dead in 1968’s Las Vampiras, which pit the Man Of 1000 Masks against imagine-the-scripts-he-turned-down horror icon John Carradine, and he mixed it up with bloodsuckers again in 1973’s The Vampires of of Coyoacan. For a time, you couldn’t swing a cat in Mexican cinema without hitting a luchadore fighting a vampire or some other ghoul.
Frankensteins
El Santo and company could have been kept busy just battling vampires day in and day out, but they had more than their fair share of battles with other classic movie monsters too, not least of all Frankenstein’s monster - or Franquestain, as Santo & Blue Demon Vs. The Monsters termed him. A fun trivia fact for Lucha Libre fans - in that movie, “Franquestain” is portrayed by legendary luchadore Tinieblas, prior to making his in-ring debut.
Away from the Lucha Libre Cinematic Universe and just back in regular Lucha Libre, there was a short-lived mask tag team of the monster Frankenstein and his brother, Frankenstein II, the good doctor never having been one for a good name. But Mary Shelley’s most famous creation occasionally wrestled north of the border as well…
In 1981, Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter awarded their very first “Most Disgusting Promotional Tactic” award - an accolade that in coming years would be given to promoters and wrestlers who exploited real-life deaths, wars and injuries, but also the 1992 push of Erik Watts, in case you ever think wrestling’s commentariat might have their priorities in order - to the Los Angeles territory, run by the incomparable Mike and Gene LeBelle, for their presentation of wrestler Tony Hernandez as “The Monster". Times were desperate, audiences were dwindling, and the territory had lost its coveted television coverage, with its only remaining programming airing solely on a small Spanish-language channel. Hernandez had worked the Frankenstein gimmick in Arizona prior to his stint in LA, with the implausible explanation that he was a wrestler disfigured in a car accident who had come to literally believe himself to be Frankenstein’s monster - the LeBelle brothers gave up on even that thin veneer of plausibility, and presented their version of The Monster as a laboratory creation that was impervious to pain. After a disastrous match with a grumpy Andre The Giant, who wanted nothing to do with such an outlandish gimmick, The Monster’s short-lived monster heel run was abandoned, and he was reinvented as a child-friendly fan favourite mascot. It wasn’t enough - Hernandez’s career sputtered to an end the same year he received the Observer’s dubious award, and the territory shut up shop some eight months later.
Despite the furore over L.A.’s Monster, it wasn’t even that character’s first foray into American territorial wrestling, as the Boris Karloff-inspired “Dr. Frank” was introduced to Memphis wrestling audiences by Jerry Lawler in 1977, and stuck around for three months, with the occasional return appearance, even tagging with The Mummy on occasion. Indeed, even this iteration of Dr. Frank wasn’t the first, as in 1967, local wrestler Nick Adams had already taken on the mantle, tagging with a Mummy portrayed by future Tennessee promoter, and Jeff Jarrett’s grandfather, Eddie Marlin.
More recently, Quebec wrestling legend Pierre Carl Ouellette took the concept of a career resurrection somewhat too literally, as with the aid of strongman and trainer D. Destro, he concocted the persona of the French-Canadian Frankenstein, the veteran wrestler brought back from the dead with a heavy dose of electricity - initially supplied by Destro from a car battery hooked up to PCO’s chest, until a vignette where, in an extreme case of living the gimmick, Ouellette paid to have a surgeon perform an incision on his chest to leave a scar where the battery was purportedly inserted. With his initials now standing for “Perfect Creation One”, the veteran grappler has to be the most successful of wrestling’s Frankenstein’s Monsters, and one of the craziest risk-takers on the scene today, even at the age of 55. I, for one, hope he keeps on going for years to come.
Mummies
I have already mentioned mummies - perhaps the only Universal classic monster to have battled more luchadores than vampires have, both on and off the screen; a personal favourite of mine being The Mummies Of Guanajuato, starring El Santo, Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras, with an opening sequence depicting the real naturally mummified bodies, victims of a Cholera epidemic, now on display in a Guanajuato museum - and, to add an unlikely degree of separation, those same bodies are shown in the opening moments of Werner Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu. Mil Mascaras also battled The Aztec Mummy in a 2007 camp homage to the Lucha Libre movies of old.
In the ring, it may surprise you that the Mummy is one of the older gimmicks we’ll consider today, appearing even before Eddie Marlin’s Memphis turn, with Benny Ramirez first donning the bandages in Houston in the late 1950s. At his height, he was surrounded with pageantry - carried to the ring in a sarcophagus and partially unwrapped before every match - and mixed it up with the biggest names of the day, even wrestling Lou Thesz, who normally eschewed gimmicks of all kinds, for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship. Aside from old Lou, this Mummy could count Gory Guerrero, Freddie Blassie, Ernie Ladd and Giant Baba amongst his opponents and, in one of wrestling’s greatest stipulation bouts, once put his mask on the line against the eyebrows of Bull Curry.
The next time you hear professional misanthrope podcaster Jim Cornette wish death upon an innocent independent wrestler for having the audacity to portray a character that doesn’t fit his idea of what constitutes believable or acceptable wrestling fare, remember that Cornette’s Smoky Mountain Wrestling featured Prince Kharis, a 4000 year old Mummy portrayed by Southern wrestler Rob Mazzie, who could also boast stints as Undertaker knock-off Gravedigger in Memphis and as The Grim Reaper, so some serious spooky credentials on display here. As Kharis, Mazzie was managed by Daryl Van Horne - better known today as Father James Mitchell, with a litany of monstrous clients in his managerial career - and wrestled precisely how you’d expect a Mummy would; slow, lumbering, uncoordinated, impervious to pain, and with clouds of talcum powder flying off him after every strike.
More infamously than Prince Kharis is WCW’s Yeti. Portrayed by the seven foot tall Ron Reis, it was something of a mystery why the Dungeon Of Doom’s monster of the Himalayas turned out to be a bandage-wrapped Egyptian Mummy, and only slightly less confusing why, once the bandages were removed, the man beneath was, without explanation, a masked Super Giant Ninja. The mind boggles. The Yeti, and Tony Schiavone’s idiosyncratic pronunciation of his name, is a legendary bit of bad wrestling, so it’s perhaps surprising to remember that he made but one short appearance wrapped in bandages, and only a handful more in his Ninja persona. Legend has it that the role of The Yeti was originally intended for El Gigante, or Giant Gonzalez, in a twist on his Bigfoot-esque hair-covered and airbrush-muscled latex bodysuit of his WWF run, but Gigante’s ill health meant he was unable to continue wrestling.
Wrestling Mummies have popped up throughout Lucha Libre, and are also a surprisingly common comedy gimmick in Japan, with the most enduring and perhaps most surreal twist on the formula being Mecha Mummy - he’s a robot Mummy, from Ancient Egypt, in the future. And I love him. With detachable giant hand and drill attachments, the ability to seemingly transform some of his opponents into their own robot equivalents, and an on-again off-again feud with Minoru Suzuki that lasted for several years, there’s an argument to be made for Mecha Mummy being one of wrestling’s strangest ever gimmicks…
But a look at wrestling’s spookiest characters, and Mummies in particularly, would not be complete without a visit to Argentina. If you have never encountered Argentina’s Titanes en el Ring, then be prepared to be amazed. You’re welcome.
Titanes en el Ring
Martin Karadagian was an Argentinian Greco-Roman wrestler who, like so many wrestling pioneers, never set out to reinvent the wheel, only to earn himself a quick buck through any means necessary. Starting out as a journeyman world traveller, Karadagian was a minor success as a handsome “ethnic babyface” in the New York territory, and as a cowardly heel in a few tours of Europe, but it was in his native Argentina that he would become a legend, and create some of wrestling’s most outré and surrealist moments.
In his native country, Karadagian tried every trick in the book, that almost read as the blueprint for the careers of subsequent generations of wrestling pioneers, trailblazers, and glory-hoggers, from Antonio Inoki to Atsushi Onita, and from Jerry “The King” Lawler to Vince McMahon. In 1957, at the home stadium of the Boca Juniors football club, he wrestled boxer José María Gatica - a successful fighter, but one dogged by controversy thanks to his continuing support of the Nazi-shielding Argentinian President Juan Perón. That same year, Karadagian made his cinematic debut, and, not content with pulling from what would become the Antonio Inoki playbook with mixed matches against fighters from other disciplines, his next big move was a proto-Andy Kaufman affair. Alberto Olmedo was a comedian who ran the gamut from bawdy sex comedies to children’s light entertainment, and his later projects was positively Kaufman-esque, tearing up scripts live on-air, disrupting sketches and routinely breaking the fourth wall. As his hit children’s character Capitan Piluso, Olmedo wrestled in a slapstick-filled match with the burly Karadagian at Buenos Aires’ Luna Park in 1961, and it was an enormous success - Argentina’s Canal 9 TV station brought in brand new outside broadcasting equipment to present the match on television in its entirety, and the hosts and commentators boasted of a turn-out of 40,000 fans; a particularly impressive feat considering the venue’s capacity of only slightly more than half that number.
The event was such a smash hit that Canal 9 wanted more, and Martin Karadagian was only too happy to oblige. The following year, he would debut his brand new TV project - Titanes en el Ring - with Karadagian himself presented as the World Heavyweight Champion, with a supporting cast of wrestlers from across South America, all hyped up as world-beaters, monsters and villains to be toppled by the national hero. He pulled from the ranks of wrestlers, physical culturists, martial artists and bodybuilders, and borrowing from the nationalistic gimmickry he had profited from in the New York territory, gave them broad strokes culturally insensitive gimmicks - the “Champion of Israel” Rene Tenembaum feuded with the ambiguously Middle Eastern Tufic Memet, and Native Americans battled with cowboys and conquistadores. So far, so professional wrestling.
It was in the late 1960s, however, that Titanes really hit its stride. Pushing back against criticism from concerned pressure groups and the Catholic Church, who argued that professional wrestling was too violent for impressionable audiences, Karadagian pledged to clean up his act and present a more child-friendly take on the genre. Following a role in a 1967 sci-fi movie, Karadagian brought the titular villain of that movie - El Hombre Invisible, The Invisible Man - to the ring, and held a wrestling match on television against his invisible opponent. Karadagian, naturally, emerged victorious, and his version of professional wrestling was off to the races.
Eventually moving to Canal 13, the newest iteration of Titanes en el Ring took its lead from El Hombre Invisible, and ran with the ball.
With an eye to his new audience of children - or else, to the watchful eye of his critics - Karadagian argued that the new Titanes was an educational affair. New characters were introduced from the worlds of history and fiction, which Karadagian argued could spark a child’s interest in history and culture - wrestling fans became accustomed to matches featuring D’Artagnan el Mosquetero, the French Beatle Jean Pierre, Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes, Julio Cesaro and Cleopatra, and the tag team of Don Quijote (sic) and Sancho Panza; true to form, Quijote was a bumbling fool in over his head, and relied on his trusty partner to get him out of trouble. As the show grew in popularity, aided by a 1973 movie, film and TV appearances by its cast of characters, a range of novelty singles and albums, even board games, and lucrative sponsorship deals, the cast of characters only became more elaborate, each one packaged with their own backstory and unique entrance music, long before the WWF cottoned on to the idea.
A whistle-stop tour of Titanes’ more outlandish characters gives you Pepino The Clown, a team of wrestling ants (some forty years before CHIKARA), The Minotaur, a trio of Androids, the motorbike-riding Mr. Moto, Yolanka the laser-firing extraterrestrial, the devilish El Diabolo, and one of my personal favourites, El Ejecutivo, the wrestling businessman who would take breaks mid-match to take phone calls and dictate to his secretary at ringside. There was no bigger attraction though, perhaps more than Martin Karadagian himself, than La Momia.
Arriving with maximum pageantry - encased in a sarcophagus and carried from a boat at the Port of Buenos Aires, where he was met by crowds of thousands, and where Titanes en el Ring’s resident Italian Mafioso stable attempted to steal said sarcophagus - La Momia was the typical wrestling mummy, a lumbering, bandage-wrapped monster, terrifying children and seemingly impervious to pain. But, following a series of matches with Martin Karadagian, the unexpected happened, and audiences started to warm to La Momia. He became almost a mascot, beloved by the children who once hid from his gaze in fear.
On a 1978 show, La Momia was set to wrestle David The Shepherd, complete with sandals, tunic, crook, and lamb in tow, played to the ring by a selection from the score to Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. When the match began, David seemed unafraid of his monstrous adversary, who reached out tentatively, and almost tenderly. Soon, they embraced, and David presented La Momia with his lamb as a peace offering, and a gift of friendship. Emotionally, the ring announcer declared that peace and love had triumphed.
From that point on, La Momia - who, over the course of Titanes en el Ring’s long existence was played by multiple wrestlers, Karadagian never letting something as mundane as whether a wrestler was actually there or not get in the way of who he advertised as appearing or who he expected to don what mask and costume that week - became a full-fledged beloved hero, with a new theme song that declared La Momia to be “the champion of justice”, who “protects the good, punishes the bad, and loves the children very tenderly”. But every hero needs a villain. First, it was The Android - later the Lead Android, to distinguish himself from future tag partners Gold and Silver Android - who debuted in 1982, the creation of the villainous Professor Demetrius, and came equipped with a costume fitted with pyrotechnic charges, allowing him to shoot sparks at his opponents, or to “malfunction” when things weren’t going his way.
None of La Momia’s career rivals, though, would match La Momia Negra, The Black Mummy. A faster, more nimble mummy than his adversary, the all-black bandaged Negra was nicknamed the Martial Arts Mummy for the speed and variety of his strikes, and for a time it seemed like the heroic Momia may have met his match. The clash between two rival Mummies was a major draw, and perhaps the last major match that the original iteration of Titanes ever managed to put together.
By the late 1980s, Karadagian’s hold on Argentinian wrestling and popular culture had begun to wane. He was in extremely ill health, the effects of diabetes having cost him his leg in 1984, and relied on some of the other wrestlers to run the show. In 1988, many of Titanes’ core roster jumped ship to short-lived rival Lucha Fuentes. That same year, faced with dwindling ratings and the absence of their top star, Titanes en el Ring was cancelled. On the final episode, Martin Karadagian threw aside his cane and stood unsteadily in the ring on his one leg, announcing that it was the love of his fans that truly kept him standing. He passed away three years later.
Titanes en el Ring, and various offshoots, have popped back up from time to time over the years, with Martin’s daughter Paula Karadagian running the most recent version since 2019. While not short of gimmicks, the current version is more down-to-earth than the company that gave us a wrestling ring full of monsters, aliens and historical luminaries, with Paula publicly declaring the need to modernise, and to focus on more roles for women and the LGBTQ+ community in whatever future Titanes may have.
But there remain some familiar faces in the new line-up - it may be a brave new world, and they may find themselves on opposing sides of intergender tag team matches, but even in 2023, La Momia Negra and La Momia Blanca continue to wage war in their feud for the ages.
