Some of us are terrified by clowns - the make-up, hair, and strange behaviour can come across as quite unsettling at the best of times. So it's no surprise that a clown deliberately geared to be scary is one of the WWE's most terrifying ideas. Originally portrayed by Matt Osborne during his stint in the WWF from 1992-6, the gimmick has been adopted by seven different wrestlers across multiple promotions (although Osborne sporadically reprised his role for special events such as the WrestleMania gimmick battle royal). Osborne incorporated various clownish antics into his matches, tripping opponents with hidden wires, attacking them with prosthetic limbs, and drenching them with buckets of water. His most infamous scheme came at WrestleMania 9, in which a duplicate Doink came from beneath the ring to interfere in his match with Crush - a trick also used by Kurt Angle at Survivor Series 2000, when his older brother Eric was used to confound the Undertaker. Doink is low on the list because the gimmick could have gone a lot further. Although certainly unsettling - and boasting a terrifying piece of theme music - Osborne's character was always more cartoonish than truly horrifying. Had the WWF been willing to really push him as a dark, evil figure, who knows how far up the card Doink The Clown could have progressed?
