Aleister Black has shed new light on one of the more curious creative decisions made during his WWE run — and it all traces back to how Vince McMahon interpreted his character.
In a new interview with WrestleRant, Black revealed that McMahon believed the Aleister Black persona was essentially a vampire, which directly influenced a notable change to his main roster presentation.
When Black debuted on Raw and SmackDown, WWE added a creaking sound effect to the start of his entrance — a noise that many fans felt clashed with the dark, stoic mystique he carried through NXT. According to Black, the sound was entirely McMahon’s idea.
“That was definitely a Vince thing. I think Vince thought that the character was a vampire and felt like old school Nosferatu, rising up. 1920s Count Orlock type,” Black said. “So he felt that he heard a creek and that’s why he wanted to have the creek there.”
The entrance itself — with Black rising slowly from a platform — was already gothic and cinematic. Still, the creaking noise sparked immediate backlash among fans, who felt it cheapened the presentation. Black said he understood their frustration, even if he wasn’t personally bothered by the sound effect.
“I didn’t mind it as much but I feel like for fans, it was a little bit of a discontinuation of what [they] love and see,” he explained. “Change is always difficult for a lot of people to accept and this wasn’t the biggest change, but I do feel that I understand where fans were coming from because I don’t personally think that it added a lot.”
Black acknowledged that the sound effect clashed with the version of the character he envisioned.
“It also kind of negated what I thought of what the character was, so it’s a different translation, but at the same time, like I could translate it and it was fine,” he continued. “It didn’t make me a very different character just because it was a creek, but yeah, that’s something that he wanted to do and that was fine. It didn’t change my mind on a lot of things, but it was definitely his thought process in that regard.”
While the creaking sound never defined his WWE run, Black’s story offers another rare glimpse into the creative instincts of Vince McMahon — and how even small production tweaks can dramatically shift how fans perceive a character on the main roster.
