Meltzer: Backstage Felt Match ‘Ruined’ NXT Halloween Havoc

NXT Halloween Havoc has come and gone, but one match from the show is already drawing criticism from within WWE itself. According to Dave Meltzer, the Naraku vs. Shiloh Hill match left a sour taste backstage, with people telling him it effectively tanked the entire event.

Speaking on Wrestling Observer Radio, Meltzer relayed the reaction he’d heard, saying, “By the way, I heard from some people there, and it was interesting, their comments to me because it was like their basic comment was, ‘Yeah, Shiloh Hill and Naraku ruined that entire show.’”

The match itself was built as an experimental, horror-tinged spectacle befitting the Halloween Havoc theme. It opened with a backstage attack and then wound its way through a series of psychedelic, Halloween-trope-laden detours before the two competitors ever got to a traditional ring. It was a swing for something different — more horror-movie sequence than conventional wrestling match — and by Meltzer’s account, it didn’t land with the people in the building.

This isn’t the first time WWE has tried something outside the box and come away with mixed, or outright bad, results. The Firefly Funhouse match between Bray Wyatt and John Cena at WrestleMania 36 is often cited as the gold standard for this kind of experimentation — a pre-taped, cinematic journey through Cena’s career that currently holds an 8.65 rating on Cagematch and is remembered fondly as a genuine deconstruction of what a wrestling match can be.

But for every Firefly Funhouse, there’s a Zombie Lumberjack match. Damien Priest’s win over The Miz at WrestleMania Backlash in 2021, tied into the Army of the Dead movie and performed with zombie-costumed lumberjacks amid piped-in crowd noise due to COVID-19 restrictions, sits at a dismal 1.16 on Cagematch and was named Worst Match of the Year in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter Awards. The Punjabi Prison matches from the mid-2000s — The Undertaker vs. Big Show, The Great Khali vs. Batista, and Randy Orton vs. Jinder Mahal — also struggled, partly because the bamboo structure made it nearly impossible for fans and camera crews to actually see the action.

The common thread is that WWE’s riskiest creative swings tend to be all-or-nothing propositions. There’s no dress rehearsal for a concept like this; it either resonates with a live crowd and a global audience or it doesn’t, and the company only finds out in real time. John Cena himself has acknowledged as much with his own John Cena Classic concept, admitting it “might be a total failure” going in.

For NXT, the Naraku-Hill match is a reminder that experimentation on a Halloween-themed show is inherently a gamble — one that can produce a beloved curiosity or a widely mocked misfire depending on execution and audience buy-in. Whether this one gets remembered alongside Firefly Funhouse or alongside Zombie Lumberjack will likely depend on how NXT follows it up and whether anything from the gimmick carries over into the characters’ ongoing stories. For now, it stands as the latest example of how thin the line is between bold and baffling when WWE tries to break from the conventional match format.