Part of Doctor Who’s enduring appeal is its power to scare. Ever since it launched in 1963, it’s been terrifying little kids and sending shivers down the spines of even the most hardened adults for decades. And who can blame them for cowering behind the sofa? From the Daleks to the Cybermen, there are an awful lot of scary Who monsters out there.
To celebrate the show’s return on Saturday (May 11) we’ve rounded up a list of the top ten scariest episodes from its rebooted years. Read at your own peril...
10) Mummy on the Orient Express (2014)
Yes, the title is silly. But there’s actually a lot to love about Mummy on the Orient Express – after all, Doctor Who has done vampires, werewolves, zombies and witches, but rarely mummies.
In this episode, Peter Capaldi’s Doctor and Jenna Coleman’s Clara visit the space Orient Express, only to find it plagued by a mysterious, murderous bandage-wrapped foe. A passenger then dies, and the whole thing suddenly gets all Agatha Christie. With dread steadily mounting and the mummy looking really rather frightening, it’s a solid addition to the canon of Who terrors, if you can look past the gimmicky premise.
9) Asylum of the Daleks (2012)
A rare Matt Smith entry on this list, Asylum of the Daleks starts promisingly – the Doctor, Amy and Rory are abducted by Daleks – but there’s a twist. These captors want the three to go into a prison-ship holding thousands of insane Daleks. It’s been damaged, and is threatening to release them (which would of course spark the mother of all space massacres) – so the Doctor’s task is to find and deactivate a force field that will then allow the ship to be blown up.
It's a solid story, and the idea of dealing with Daleks that are even more insane than usual certainly brings the heebie-jeebies – but the best bit about Asylum is undoubtedly the twist at the end, which is horror-movie worthy.
8) The Unquiet Dead (2005)
A decent offering from the early Who days of Christopher Eccleston, The Unquiet Dead takes the Doctor and Rose to Victorian Cardiff, where they meet Charles Dickens and discover that something sinister is lurking in the gas pipes of his house. That pesky gas is sucking the life out of people, before reanimating them into sinister gas-zombies… look, it’s scarier than it sounds, and watching Rose struggle to escape a room filled with the things remains profoundly creepy.
7) Midnight (2008)
Midnight won all the plaudits when it first aired in 2008, and it has aged pretty well. The majority of the action takes place on the deep-space equivalent of a tour bus, which breaks down when a creepy alien lifeforce manages to sneak on board and infect one of the passengers. Isolated in the middle of nowhere, it’s a grim premise – but arguably worse is watching the way the rest of the inhabitants turn on each other in fear. A slow burner, but a rather existentially horrifying one.
6) Silence in the Library/ Forest of the Dead (2008)
Doctor Who has a good track record of making innocuous things feel creepy: blinking, sleeping, talking. But one of the worst may have to be Silence in the Library, which probably ruined bedtime for a lot of kids and their very tired parents.
Here, it’s the shadows you have to fear – as David Tennant’s Doctor and Catherine Tate’s Donna soon discover. They’ve headed to a planet-sized library to have a look around, only to find out it’s infested with Vashta Nerada: tiny space piranhas that lurk in the shadows and can strip a human to a skeleton in less than a second.
Watching as it picks off the members of their team, one by one, is exceptionally creepy, as is the way the tiny piranhas then animate the body like a corpse-puppet. Yep, any kids watching aren’t going to sleep any time soon.
5) Night Terrors (2011)
Like clowns, dollies should be fun, but often end up being creepy instead. And so it proves with Night Terrors, which traps the Doctor and co inside a massive doll’s house stalked by massive, china-faced peg dolls. Naturally, the house’s inhabitants soon start getting picked off, and viewers are left with an irrational fear of being stalked down never-ending corridors. No thanks.
4) The Impossible Planet/ The Satan Pit (2006)
A classic from the early David Tennant days, in this nail-biting two-parter the Doctor and Rose visit a moon orbiting a black hole. Something’s keeping the moon from being sucked into oblivion – and it turns out that something is very, very bad. In fact, it’s probably the Devil, and it soon takes over one researcher and sets about turning the local Ood (tentacle-faced humanoid servants) all red-eyed and murderous.
Often forgotten, it’s a genuinely chilling piece of television, that makes excellent use of jump scares and last-minute twists. And there are many, many deaths.
3) The Waters of Mars (2009)
What’s worse than being trapped on a creepy space station? Why, being trapped on a creepy space station with zombies, of course! In this hour-long special the Doctor touches down on a research station in Mars, only for it to transpire that something malevolent is in the water and is turning its inhabitants into terrifying husks of themselves.
As a child, the gummy dead-eyed smiles of the zombies gave me nightmares for weeks – and a temporary aversion to the bathroom taps. And the episode’s uncharacteristically bleak ending really hammers home that sense of dread.
2) The Empty Child/ The Doctor Dances (2005)
The episodes that really brought Doctor Who back into the public consciousness as the ‘scary’ TV show. Aired as part of its inaugural run back in 2005, The Empty Child took Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor and Billie Piper’s Rose to London during the Blitz – but the falling bombs aren’t the scariest part. That credit goes to the terrifying gas mask zombies wandering the streets, infecting everybody they touch. The words “are you my mummy?” still send a shiver down the spine of many a Who fan, and rightly so: it’s right up there with the scariest episodes the show has ever produced.
1) Blink (2007)
The prize, however, has to go to Blink. Written by staff writer and later showrunner Steven Moffat and based on a 2006 Doctor Who Annual story, Blink is unusual in that it shifts focus from the Doctor to a different protagonist – in this case Carey Mulligan’s Sally Sparrow.
Sally becomes fixated with the creepy old house in her neighbourhood, and soon becomes entangled with the Weeping Angels – terrifying statues that move only when you Blink. The concept is solid gold, the quotes are too (the phrase “wibbly wobbly, timey wimey” originated here) and the jump-scare editing as the angels advance on Sally is nail-biting stuff. A classic.
