Horror and terror are two of the main driving forces of Doctor Who. It has always had the ingenious ability to get under your skin and make you question everything that made you feel safe. What is it about those hair raising moments that send a shiver down our spine that stay with us? Why does Doctor Who scare us so when we know the Doctor will save the day? Personally for me, there have only been three episodes that have genuinely scared me so I’ll try to decipher Doctor Who’s innate ability to scare the living daylights out of us in reference to those.

The first story to make me absolutely terrified was ‘Survival’. I remember being nine years old and seeing those characters being chased by the cheetah people and realising they had no escape and feeling terrified because I imagined that happening to me…I was a cheery child. It wasn’t just the eerie speed and swiftness of those bipedal cheetahs on horseback that scared me, it was their faces. I knew it was makeup but it just scared me because it was so realistic yet so unrealistic at the same time. And when they got off their horses things only got worse! They were fast and had incredible agility for creatures that had just learned to walk on two legs. It reminded me somewhat of Planet of the Apes…except they were cheetahs…but the point is they terrified me. And then just when I thought it was all over, the Master had cheetah teeth! And he started an army (maybe it wasn’t big enough for an army. Posse? Pride?) of people with cheetah teeth and they had cheetah eyes too. If you haven’t watched ‘Survival’ yet, be warned: Anthony Ainley with select cheetah features is absolutely terrifying.

The second episode that I was scared of was ‘The Empty Child’. Something about the ‘sing-song’ voice of Jamie chilled me to the core. I remember my nine year old self making my Dad go around to each door and window around the house and locking it again to make sure nothing could get in. I didn’t sleep that night. Many people are scared of Jamie. But why? After all he’s just a boy looking for his Mummmmmmyyy…Oh, that’s why. The fact that we can’t see his face for the whole episode also lends itself to an incredible amount of creepiness. Those big, black, round eye holes seem to go on and on and on into a dark abyss of creepiness.

The third episode was ‘Listen’…hey, don’t judge! Just because I’m an adult, doesn’t mean I’m immune to Steven Moffat. Unlike ‘The Empty Child’ or ‘Survival’, the whole episode wasn’t creepy for me but there was one specific moment that made my hair stand on end. It was the moment when Danny/Rupert and Clara were underneath his bed and the bed slowly got closer to the floor as someone or something sat on it. It sent chills down my spine because that’s the sort of thing that gets to me. That slow realisation that something is there lurking behind (or above) you and that there’s nothing you can do really terrifies me. Two thoughts crossed my mind during this scene:

1: “Haha, it would be funny if that was the Doctor.”
2: “Oh…that’s probably not the Doctor…”

I think you can guess the point where my hair stood on end.

So what makes a scary Doctor Who episode? I think everyone would agree with me here, that some of the scariest villains in Doctor Who over the years have been the simple ones. And not just the Steven Moffat creations. Even though he is very good at turning simple things into terrifying death machines, he wasn’t the first to do it. The Autons are a perfect example of an everyday thing being turned into something sinister. Anything plastic can turn on you when the Nestene Consciousness is around and the fact that almost everything in our lives is made of plastic these days makes for a terrifying villain. In my opinion, simplicity is Doctor Who’s bread and butter. Going back to ‘Listen’, that was a bed being weighed down. That’s all it took to nearly make me regenerate. With a good writer and a spoon, Doctor Who could be the most terrifying show ever because simplicity is what the show does best so with a mannequin or a gas mask or a sheet it can do a whole lot more and it does.

Doctor Who is scary because it taps into one of our most basic fears: that that shadow in the corner of our eye or that creepy looking doll aren’t inanimate at all, they’re malevolent creatures hell bent on taking over the world and taking you out is just a stepping stone…that got a bit more specific than I originally intended but I hope you get the gist.