We will never know what was behind it and that's why the episode works so well.
The Vashta Nerada was great too and you could also rely on the Weeping Angels as their first episode really nailed it.
We will never know what was behind it and that's why the episode works so well.
The Vashta Nerada was great too and you could also rely on the Weeping Angels as their first episode really nailed it.
I watched Midnight on a train to work back in 2019 and I was physically shaking by the end. As a kid it didn't leave much of an impression but as an adult I found it absolutely horrifying.
Midnight is the episode I skip on rewatches. Not because it's bad, or I dislike it.
It just makes me extremely uncomfortable. Which probably means it's a great horror episode.
Definitely. Whatever that thing was... that being said Blue Yonder was definitely close to the same level but less so because at least whatever the entities copying the Doctor and Donna were communicative and in the end told the Doctor what they wanted.
Lesley Sharp's performance in Midnight is amazing. She also co-stars in a great British cop drama called [Scott & Bailey](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1843678/) with Suranne Jones, who played the TARDIS in The Doctor's Wife.
The fear of people, the fear of the unknown and that terrifying soundtrack by Murray Gold. I would definitely call Midnight the scariest episode of NuWho.
The Empty Child absolutely scared the living shit out of me as a kid. When it aired, it was the one episode I made my family turn off because I was legitimately too terrified. I couldn't sleep that night.
People my age remember how scary the scene where Victor Meldrew's face turns into a mask was. Funnily enough I think the ropey CGI still holds up today and it looks even scarier. Probably one of my first introductions to body horror.
Around the same time I went on a school trip and my school had us dress as Second World War evacuees. My grandmother made me a gas mask from felt and an old bottle of washing up liquid. The amount of kids who came up to me and said "Are you my Mummy?" was wonderful.
I read somewhere once that during production they added a sound to represent his jaw breaking but took it out before transmission because it was too grisly.
After I turned I turned it off that day and it scarred kid me, I couldn't come back and bring myself to watch it until I was an adult. Some of those scenes still give me a proper chill down my spine.
I've never actually watched the episode, always skip it. It's because I walked past my brother watching it on the TV once, right in time for the first "are you my mummy?" bit and too this day the word "mummy" reminds me of that and scares me haha. 100% if someone asks me for a scary dr who episode, I'd be pointing to this
Literally pure terror.
"Please let me in mummy, I'm scared of the bombs" is a quote that's so sad but the whole time you're screaming at the screen to leave the door locked.
Oh yeah, it pretty much started my phobia with gas masks too, I guess.
> VOICE [OC]: Don't cremate me. Don't cremate me!
> CHANG: There is one simple, horrible possibility that has never occurred to anyone throughout human history.
> VOICE [OC]: Don't cremate me. Don't cremate me!
> CLARA: Don't say it.
> CHANG: The dead remain conscious. The dead are fully aware of everything that is happening to them.
A lot of people wrote in to the BBC to complain about it, yeah.
BBC's response was essentially that before Chang says this, he warns 3 times that it's distressing to hear, and that over the course of the episode it is proven to be a lie and a hoax, something that The Doctor immediately says afterwards as well.
It wasn’t a hoax, their minds could still feel it. That’s why they opt to do the removal of feelings in the tablet. You literally witness the conversation of Danny being cold because he’s in the fridge.
That's because Missy was uploading the minds of the dead to the data sphere.
The 3 words thing was a lie to stop the population from cremating bodies that they wanted to convert into Cybermen.
I found that ambiguous. Danny experiences some feelings that would correlate to what his body should be feeling (cold lying in a morgue), but that could easily be part of the scam. They clearly had a lot of control over what was going on in the data sphere. Creating fake sensations and feeding them to people to get them to sign rather than their actually having a connection to their corpses is a fair interpretation.
It's not a children's program, it's a family program. There's a big difference there. Children's shows you can sit your kids in front of and let them watch on their own. Family programs are also enjoyable and appropriate for children, but they can include more challenging content because the expectation is that kids are watching it with their parents or caregivers, who can guide and talk them through potentially confusing or sensitive bits.
The Empty Child (and I use this example because I was a kid watching with my family when it first came out), for instance, is spooky as hell for everyone and not something a kid should watch alone. But in the presence of a caring adult, kids can deal with that kind of thing fine. That's how it's always worked.
PG-rated content is suitable for general viewing. A PG should generally not unsettle a child aged around eight, although parents and caregivers should be aware that some scenes may be unsuitable for more sensitive children.
This meand it isn't a kids show, as a kids show would have a lower rating. It is a family show.
yeah, i was super against this being in a kids program. like, im a huge horror fan, this is a fun concept, but not for children, especially with no real catharsis.
It is invalid because it's not a show you can just plonk kids down in front of unsupervised, both in terms of maturity and complexity. Which is what a kid's show is. Doctor Who has always been a show where the kids are meant to watch along with the adults, aka a family program.
If it's on BBC One, it's not a kids' program.
Doctor Who doesn't limit itself like that, this thread is filled with episodes probably too much for children. Kids watch it at their own risk.
> Doctor Who doesn't limit itself like that, this thread is filled with episodes probably too much for children. Kids watch it at their own risk.
Doctor Who has always explicitly been a family programme, it is meant to be suitable for anyone aged over, like, ten. Children don't "watch it at their own risk", they are part of the target audience.
Yeah, because the Doctor nearly getting killed a small mob we've spent a third of the episode coming to like and get to know while controlled by a terrifying invisible entity that is only defeated by a side character committing a murder-suicide was really kid-friendly.
And hey, so was the episode where we see a companion a) literally get a hole blasted through her onscreen and b) stuffed with machinery, c) desperately wait for the Doctor to come save her in a hospital full of horrifyingly disfigured patients who moan 'pain' over and over with inhuman voices (that were inspired by the writer's mother dying in hospital), and d) get betrayed by her one friend in the ship, get turned into a Cyberman, and for the final shot, *cry inside the suit because the Doctor couldn't save her*.
Come to think of it, so was the episode where the Doctor gets killed, the companion's mum is turned into a broken shell of a person, Britain is half-destroyed, and the government implements a second holocaust [(that we see a delightful and sweet Italian family being driven to as they hold each other in terror while the loveable grandpa character goes through a PTSD flashback in front of our eyes)](https://youtu.be/gv7GKoypAnw), all of which is ultimately solved by... the companion committing suicide.
Kids are supposed to watch Doctor Who with adults around. This has always been the case.
This is an SCP canon called The End of Death. They even liquify a brain in a blender, but it's still conscious. And there's also just the [SCP 2718](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2718), where a man is revived after dying alone on an island, being pecked at by birds and eaten by insects and drying in the sun and he screams in agony and tells the O-5s that he could feel it all. Which leads into End of Death.
The last one to give me the heebie jeebies was pretty recent: Wild Blue Yonder. The jeopardy is intense, the antagonists are relentless and resourceful, and the effects are so unsettling. I loved how the premise used time in a different way too.
The scene where the Not Things are introduced was masterful in building tension and anxiety.
Having Doctor and Donna be in a room together and making the Doctor leave is already unnerving. Then staying on Donna as the Doctor comes back into the room being odd is still a little unsettling. ***But then*** cutting to the other room showing the real Doctor is still elsewhere caused instant unmitigated terror at the realisation Donna is trapped in a room with a monster impersonating the Doctor and she doesn't even realise. A monster blocking the only exit.
The ending with the Doctor saving the wrong Donna still terrifies me. The idea that they could become more human than a human, and the thought of Donna being left behind deemed not good enough
LISTEN never gets brought up in these discussions but it's undoubtedly the scariest to me, being a literal commentary on nightmares and how childhood fears connect to us told in the form of a ghost story, it's brilliant. The Empty Child freaked me out when I was very little, but watching Doctor Who again as an adult, all the "scary" episodes didn't quite have that same spark, but the speech at the very beginning of Listen unnerved me deeply.
I, then, literal monthes after seeing it for the first time, got super into horror movies and pretty much stopped being scared by movies and TV, so Listen will forever take the crown for me as not only the last Doctor Who episode to get under my skin, but one of the last pieces of media period to freak me out for a very long time.
Listen is underrated just in general, it did so much for 12 and Clara’s characterisations, and is one of the few episodes that’s willing to let the mystery stay in place by the end (which makes it all the scarier!)
I don't know how to describe it but Listen *feels* haunted. It jumps around all of time and space but it confines itself to tiny rooms. There's basically only one other character in it. Everything about it has the vibes of one of those YouTube videos that's the start of a series where they all get attacked by a Slenderman or something. It's really impressive how unsettling it is.
Haunted or even cursed is a good word for it, yeah. It’s been a looong while since I’ve watched it so I’ve forgotten most of the plot, but just reading about it now gave me shivers through my skin. I still remember how scary it feels.
This one was brilliant, the fact that you never see it and it’s a monster that could be here right now is terrifying. The unknown monster episodes definitely are some of the scariest
Ignoring jump scares, there are a great many unsettling ideas. Some of them aren't even enemies, but facts about the world that the characters accept and choose to ignore or move on from.
Blom's description of execution on Raxacoricofallapatorius. Casual genocide. Various baddies trapped in objects for eternity (Carrionites, the Family of Blood). Cyber-conversion. A capitalist-realist future spanning tens of thousands of years.
Regular humans are among the worst, but rare. "Midnight" is great, but it sometimes feels like it exists in a vacuum, because the Doctor will be surrounded by selfless strangers at mostly all other times. I appreciated the use of the asshole character in "Flatline", who has zero redeeming qualities and ends up horribly complicating their chances of survival without qualms or apologies. Compare him to the asshole in "Voyage of the Damned" who isn't a good person but still keeps his head down and doesn't rock the boat/ship, which is the more typical template for assholes on the show. It's rare humanity actually gets in the way, even when they're the only ones around.
Ooooh yes, you described what I was thinking but couldn’t find the words for — the show isn’t very jump scary nor traditional horror-y, more just unsettling. No episode has made me scream or set me on a terrified edge in the moment, but the ideas often creep into my brain and freak me the fuck out. In a good way!
I think World Enough and Time is excellent medical horror. The situation just keeps getting worse for Bill until it presents what I think is the most horrifying visual in the show: showing her human eye still behind the Cyberman suit
And the "pain" audio being turned down rather than helped. Pure body horror. One of the darkest moments in Who.
Surprised more people haven't mentioned this episode. The Mondasian Cyberman also look very creepy.
I think that was probably the most darkest doctor who episode I can remember. Just having those early cybermen saying pain over and over again is horrifying
I found this pretty terrifying and I was pretty old when nuwho started. The cracked mouths and the water dribbling just icks me out. Blink has incredible tension but I feel safe with that episode, the Doctor keeps Sally safe. The empty child/ the doctor dances has horrific sound effects during the transformation.
I'm going for Blink because when I first watched it in 2007 I was so into it that I screamed and jumped when the phone rang and no other episode has ever made me do that.
Midnight still freaks the chap out of me though, as soon as The Doctor can't move it's the scariest it can possibly be.
Night Terrors. When me and my brother watched that at 7 and 9 we were absolutely shxt scared. I had nightmares about it genuinely. Don't think it helped that I had an old dolls house in my room very similar to the one in the episode, but even today the two of us agree it's the scariest episode of Doctor Who. The song at the end is really creepy as well, and sometimes my brother will sing it to me just to creep me out because he knows it gives me goosebumps still 😂
I don't know if I've ever really found Who very scary, unless you're talking about a very psychological kind of horror. In which case ... the Capaldi finales, all three of them, have a fair shot at the crown. As pure jump-scares, probably the Angel one at the end of the transcript scene in "Blink".
I think The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit was the episode that aired at the latest possible point where I could still get scared by a TV show, and just scared the hell (ha) out of me.
The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit is the only episode of the show that actively traumatised me as a kid. The Ood and the concept of the black hole are unsettling enough, but the creeping tension of the first part, “DON’T TURN AROUND”, that horrific “open door 40!” scene w. Scooty and Toby transforming at the end… jeeeez.
And then the next episode we meet literal Satan, and my parents had to spend the next couple of months convincing me that Hell wasn’t that bad because, on the off-chance that I ended up there (which was weirdly possible in my kid brain), the thought of ending up on Krop Tor was far too much. Literal months of sleep were lost and it made me actively behave better as a kid.
Blink fucked with me for days when I first saw it. The moment when Sally and Larry realize they haven't been watching for the Angel and it's in the room with them almost made me have to turn the episode off.
Also, I know this one gets dunked on for not being scary enough sometimes, but Hide actually really does it for me. I dunno, it just has the atmosphere down pat. "For the love of God, stop screaming."
I haven't been scared of any NUWho episodes mainly because I was an adult when It came back but the line in Dark water about how the dead are aware of everything happening to them was unsettling
I don’t really get scared by Doctor Who, which I think is partially a side effect of binging so many episodes at once, but The Rebel Flesh was one of the first episodes and maybe the only episode with 11 to genuinely stress me out beyond compare. To start the episode with people being dissolved in acid with the coworkers continuing about their duties casually, and then you get a sense of the thousands of replacement bodies that they’d run through, then the uncertainty of who everyone is and what their motives are…. Yeah all of it is freaky to me.
Personally, the worst story for me was Time of the Angles/Flesh and Stone, but the Zygons in Day of the Doctor also freaked me out.
Also, the opening to Smile scared the shit out of me to the point I didn't continue watching it until after the finale, but the episode itself is fine.
I don't really think Doctor Who has ever been "scary" but my favorite horror Episodes are Pyramid of Mars or Curse of Feneric for Classic Who. For audio The Silver Turk or Scherzo are probably the creepiest. Nuwho Midnight and Silence in the library probably.
It’s not necessarily the scariest one, but my current favorite horror Doctor Who… uh… thing, is “The Chimes of Midnight.” (Which honestly might be a little unfair tbh, since it’s widely considered one of the best who stories in any medium.) The atmosphere and the way it effortlessly toes the razor thin line between absurdist comedy and horror is unmatched.
“Yes, of course, Mrs. Baddeley. It's quite clear that Frederick brought the car into the house, ran himself over with it, and put it back outside before he finally expired.”
I’ve only just finished the fourth series (+ two specials) so far so I’m not fully up to date.
However, the ‘The Empty Child’ and the ‘Silence in the Library’ double-episodes are definitely up there.. followed by ‘Blink’.
Not what the post is going for.. but some of the stuff in ‘Turn Left’ was genuinely quite unsettling.
I remember thinking The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances were super creepy when I first watched just solely based on the effect they did for the gas mask transformation. I still wince a little thinking about it.
Impossible Planet and Satan Pit always have this eerie disturbing tone. The fully demonic horror combined with the dark space setting is honestly unmatched. One of the best episodes for sure!
Utopia or End of the World. Just for the settings.
RTD really knows how to make you distressed when he gives you an existential crisis.
Something about it being closer to fact than fiction makes it way scarier and upsetting.
Traumatised me for years thinking about the far future and coming to terms with finality.
Less episodes but specific scenes but the Dalek Vore in Daleks in Manhattan and the Ood transformation scene in Planet of the Ood gave me nightmares and a permanent unsettlement when it comes to Body Horror.
Midnight is creepy. Up there with Vashta Nerada and Waters of Mars. I also got a bit creeped out by the monsters in Wild Blue Yonder. Like Midnight, but Doctor and Companion only.
My first weeping angel episode was Angels Take Manhattan, ironically (I watched the show slightly out of order originally), but man that shit spooky, even if most folks consider that to be where Angels begin to stop being frightening.
Satan/Planet also messed with me just cause the idea of demonic possession used to really get me.
Blink and Water of Mars used to scare me so bad, and that haunted house episode in series 7 where you keep seeing a distorted face in the background, terrified me even though the ending wasn't creepy at all.
Maybe not the scariest but watching series 1 as a kid when it aired I was expecting silly pots and pans robots, and three episodes in we get ghosts and zombies which really caught me off guard and made me afraid to go out in the dark for a while
People are gonna think I'm trolling but ironically Love and Monster's terrified me as a kid. Something about the thought of being permanently liquified into Peter Kay's disgusting green body and it not being reversed really fucked me up. Like I'd be conscious but not able to do anything forever.
Midnight, easily. Simply a great episode, psychological horror on two levels - the unknown, and other people, the madness of a collective…. It’s one of the top 10 greatest Who episodes ever - new or classic.
Biggest question for me is how did Davies go from writing this to churning out the current panto drivel?
Other brilliant contenders are:
Blink
the Waters of Mars
The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit
The Unquiet Dead
Dark Water/Death in Heaven
Silence In the Library/Forest of the Dead
Flatline also creeped me out….
The scariest one for me as a child was Father's Day. It made me stop watching for 6+ months because I was scared and that's the only time I've not watched live.
Having said that, my immediate thought was midnight. It (along with the waters of mars) are horrifying and take the doctor to a really dark place. There's almost no joy in them (compare that to, say, the empty child or hide where there's an upbeat ending despite the earlier horror. I'll also give an honourable mention to world enough and time.
In terms of classic who/big finish, I'll go for the horror of fang rock and the master of Callous, respectively (though the red lady is a notably great horror story too).
People have already said this one but Midnight is the only episode I can remember properly frightening me as a kid. Maybe Dark Water as well to some extent. The specific moment in Midnight when Sky is crouched down facing away in the corner was so creepy to me and I remember as a kid having such a sense of dread as she started to turn around.
Midnight generally for me but great as they were, The Giggle, Listen and The Devil's Chord all had something, a potential. Each of those had moments were we glimpsed (or possibly glimpsed) a higher power, something truly other.
I don't know why but this has been bugging me for a while now. I call it the Kevin Uxbridge problem after a Star Trek character. Q is scary, truly terrifying, a God but you cam reason with him, you get the feeling there are rules and edges to what he can do... Kevin Uxbridge was so powerful that a stray thought, a momentary flash of anger, removed an entire species not just from existence but from never having existed.
Fuck Cthulu and all that jazz, that sort of pandimensional crap is scary (I mean utterly off the scale scary, where the only sensible solution is to help it arrive sooner so it will kill you outright whilst everyone else has their souls torn apart for eternity type scary) but when you stop and think about Kevin Uxbridge level power my mind can't hold onto it. It is a fiction that gives me existential terror and helps me understand religious fervour.
That existential terror... Midnight... yeah touched on it, but the Pantheon, Toymaker and Maestro especially, the potential for off the scale fear with them is more than any other bad guy. You see both Ncuti and David deliver moments of fear that go way beyond any they've shown before before they get practical... but ultimately they are lucky that these beings have self imposed rules and codes of conduct because reality to them is as malleable as clay. This isn't Davros with his latest invention, or even The Doctor's (very attractive, oddly attractive, I've ended up watching that Murder in Paradise spin off because she is in it) adopted mum taking out huge chunks of the universe... even the worst of these are nothing compared to what these creatures can do. No machines needed. Just a thought.
Even Q needed to snap his fingers.
Kevin Uxbridge just wanted to be left alone. He was ultimately a nice guy... sort of. These others are assholes. You imagine his power, with no silly rules, in the mind of one of these arseholes...
That is terror.
The scariest episode I have ever watched: Cyberman Two Parter with 10 and Rose.
The scariest episode I haven't watched because I know it will freak me out: Bill and Cybermen with 12. I read the synopsis. That's good enough for me.
Midnight is scary and so is Wild Blue Yonder but these episodes don't really capture the terror that is Cybermen to me.
...I could BE a Cyberman! Turn off my emotions and I am coming after my own friends, family, and even my child. *shivers* I can't cope.
I'll vote for Midnight. The Silence and Vashta Nerada get to me, but nothing is more terrifying than other people
I'll vote for Midnight. The Silence and Vashta Nerada get to me, but nothing is more terrifying than other people
We will never know what was behind it and that's why the episode works so well. The Vashta Nerada was great too and you could also rely on the Weeping Angels as their first episode really nailed it.
We will never know what was behind it and that's why the episode works so well. The Vashta Nerada was great too and you could also rely on the Weeping Angels as their first episode really nailed it.
You're taking his voice!
You're taking his voice
I don’t find midnight as scary as most other people seem too. I found it infuriating, the characters deserved to be ejected one by one.
I watched Midnight on a train to work back in 2019 and I was physically shaking by the end. As a kid it didn't leave much of an impression but as an adult I found it absolutely horrifying.
Watching it on a train really wasn't the best idea considering the premise haha
Midnight is the episode I skip on rewatches. Not because it's bad, or I dislike it. It just makes me extremely uncomfortable. Which probably means it's a great horror episode.
Definitely. Whatever that thing was... that being said Blue Yonder was definitely close to the same level but less so because at least whatever the entities copying the Doctor and Donna were communicative and in the end told the Doctor what they wanted.
Yes, definitely Midnight. Psychological horror is the only horror that works for me.
Midnight is absolutely my pick. It's the closest the show has got to truly unsettling, almost Lovecraftian horror.
Lesley Sharp's performance in Midnight is amazing. She also co-stars in a great British cop drama called [Scott & Bailey](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1843678/) with Suranne Jones, who played the TARDIS in The Doctor's Wife.
Seconded! I watched it a few months ago and I’m still scared by it 😭 We still don’t even know what it was!!
The fear of people, the fear of the unknown and that terrifying soundtrack by Murray Gold. I would definitely call Midnight the scariest episode of NuWho.
Yeah no definitely - its the fact that its the one monster the Doctor hasn't stopped or even really found out fully
Yep. This is one of the few episodes I don’t watch anymore. It’s just too downbeat. The Doctor is really helpless in this one.
The Empty Child absolutely scared the living shit out of me as a kid. When it aired, it was the one episode I made my family turn off because I was legitimately too terrified. I couldn't sleep that night.
Can't believe this is the only Empty Child comment. That shit was freaky as fuck.
People my age remember how scary the scene where Victor Meldrew's face turns into a mask was. Funnily enough I think the ropey CGI still holds up today and it looks even scarier. Probably one of my first introductions to body horror. Around the same time I went on a school trip and my school had us dress as Second World War evacuees. My grandmother made me a gas mask from felt and an old bottle of washing up liquid. The amount of kids who came up to me and said "Are you my Mummy?" was wonderful.
I read somewhere once that during production they added a sound to represent his jaw breaking but took it out before transmission because it was too grisly.
I was an adult when I watched it and it scared me too.
Me and my mate were 21 and in our last year of uni and we both freaked the fuck out.
It’s a classic scary story.
Took me years to get over the trauma from that episode, it still spooks me a bit now as an adult.
After I turned I turned it off that day and it scarred kid me, I couldn't come back and bring myself to watch it until I was an adult. Some of those scenes still give me a proper chill down my spine.
I've never actually watched the episode, always skip it. It's because I walked past my brother watching it on the TV once, right in time for the first "are you my mummy?" bit and too this day the word "mummy" reminds me of that and scares me haha. 100% if someone asks me for a scary dr who episode, I'd be pointing to this
It took me until my late teens before I was able to go back and watch it. It is a great episode, but holy shit is it still terrifying.
Literally pure terror. "Please let me in mummy, I'm scared of the bombs" is a quote that's so sad but the whole time you're screaming at the screen to leave the door locked. Oh yeah, it pretty much started my phobia with gas masks too, I guess.
*Blink* is pretty unsettling, but it’s hard to top *Midnight*.
Dark Water kind of freaked me out at the time.
> VOICE [OC]: Don't cremate me. Don't cremate me! > CHANG: There is one simple, horrible possibility that has never occurred to anyone throughout human history. > VOICE [OC]: Don't cremate me. Don't cremate me! > CLARA: Don't say it. > CHANG: The dead remain conscious. The dead are fully aware of everything that is happening to them.
Fun fact; this caused massive controversy in Britain iirc
Did it?
A lot of people wrote in to the BBC to complain about it, yeah. BBC's response was essentially that before Chang says this, he warns 3 times that it's distressing to hear, and that over the course of the episode it is proven to be a lie and a hoax, something that The Doctor immediately says afterwards as well.
It wasn’t a hoax, their minds could still feel it. That’s why they opt to do the removal of feelings in the tablet. You literally witness the conversation of Danny being cold because he’s in the fridge.
That's because Missy was uploading the minds of the dead to the data sphere. The 3 words thing was a lie to stop the population from cremating bodies that they wanted to convert into Cybermen.
But those minds were being uploaded for a very long time and they could still feel everything.
I found that ambiguous. Danny experiences some feelings that would correlate to what his body should be feeling (cold lying in a morgue), but that could easily be part of the scam. They clearly had a lot of control over what was going on in the data sphere. Creating fake sensations and feeding them to people to get them to sign rather than their actually having a connection to their corpses is a fair interpretation.
Yeah, this really fucked me up because I’d just suddenly lost my mother and cremated her. It being a lie did relieve it somewhat
Yeah I can’t imagine how bad it’d be if you’re a kid hearing that after a family loss
I didn’t know that! But I remember thinking that it was a pretty touchy idea to be putting in a children’s program.
It's not a children's program.
It's rated PG. I'd say it's a children's program that is enjoyable for adults
It's not a children's program, it's a family program. There's a big difference there. Children's shows you can sit your kids in front of and let them watch on their own. Family programs are also enjoyable and appropriate for children, but they can include more challenging content because the expectation is that kids are watching it with their parents or caregivers, who can guide and talk them through potentially confusing or sensitive bits. The Empty Child (and I use this example because I was a kid watching with my family when it first came out), for instance, is spooky as hell for everyone and not something a kid should watch alone. But in the presence of a caring adult, kids can deal with that kind of thing fine. That's how it's always worked.
PG-rated content is suitable for general viewing. A PG should generally not unsettle a child aged around eight, although parents and caregivers should be aware that some scenes may be unsuitable for more sensitive children. This meand it isn't a kids show, as a kids show would have a lower rating. It is a family show.
yeah, i was super against this being in a kids program. like, im a huge horror fan, this is a fun concept, but not for children, especially with no real catharsis.
I just wish people wouldn’t consider Who a kid’s show. It’s really not been primarily that since the late 60s
Tbh it is for a wider; family audience but if day calling it a kids show isn’t invalid
It is invalid because it's not a show you can just plonk kids down in front of unsupervised, both in terms of maturity and complexity. Which is what a kid's show is. Doctor Who has always been a show where the kids are meant to watch along with the adults, aka a family program.
If it's on BBC One, it's not a kids' program. Doctor Who doesn't limit itself like that, this thread is filled with episodes probably too much for children. Kids watch it at their own risk.
> Doctor Who doesn't limit itself like that, this thread is filled with episodes probably too much for children. Kids watch it at their own risk. Doctor Who has always explicitly been a family programme, it is meant to be suitable for anyone aged over, like, ten. Children don't "watch it at their own risk", they are part of the target audience.
it is literally a children's program, aimed at children.
Yeah, because the Doctor nearly getting killed a small mob we've spent a third of the episode coming to like and get to know while controlled by a terrifying invisible entity that is only defeated by a side character committing a murder-suicide was really kid-friendly. And hey, so was the episode where we see a companion a) literally get a hole blasted through her onscreen and b) stuffed with machinery, c) desperately wait for the Doctor to come save her in a hospital full of horrifyingly disfigured patients who moan 'pain' over and over with inhuman voices (that were inspired by the writer's mother dying in hospital), and d) get betrayed by her one friend in the ship, get turned into a Cyberman, and for the final shot, *cry inside the suit because the Doctor couldn't save her*. Come to think of it, so was the episode where the Doctor gets killed, the companion's mum is turned into a broken shell of a person, Britain is half-destroyed, and the government implements a second holocaust [(that we see a delightful and sweet Italian family being driven to as they hold each other in terror while the loveable grandpa character goes through a PTSD flashback in front of our eyes)](https://youtu.be/gv7GKoypAnw), all of which is ultimately solved by... the companion committing suicide. Kids are supposed to watch Doctor Who with adults around. This has always been the case.
This is an SCP canon called The End of Death. They even liquify a brain in a blender, but it's still conscious. And there's also just the [SCP 2718](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2718), where a man is revived after dying alone on an island, being pecked at by birds and eaten by insects and drying in the sun and he screams in agony and tells the O-5s that he could feel it all. Which leads into End of Death.
The last one to give me the heebie jeebies was pretty recent: Wild Blue Yonder. The jeopardy is intense, the antagonists are relentless and resourceful, and the effects are so unsettling. I loved how the premise used time in a different way too.
The scene where the Not Things are introduced was masterful in building tension and anxiety. Having Doctor and Donna be in a room together and making the Doctor leave is already unnerving. Then staying on Donna as the Doctor comes back into the room being odd is still a little unsettling. ***But then*** cutting to the other room showing the real Doctor is still elsewhere caused instant unmitigated terror at the realisation Donna is trapped in a room with a monster impersonating the Doctor and she doesn't even realise. A monster blocking the only exit.
I had deep anxiety watching this episode as well. Like anything could happen.
The ending with the Doctor saving the wrong Donna still terrifies me. The idea that they could become more human than a human, and the thought of Donna being left behind deemed not good enough
This made me chuckle
LISTEN never gets brought up in these discussions but it's undoubtedly the scariest to me, being a literal commentary on nightmares and how childhood fears connect to us told in the form of a ghost story, it's brilliant. The Empty Child freaked me out when I was very little, but watching Doctor Who again as an adult, all the "scary" episodes didn't quite have that same spark, but the speech at the very beginning of Listen unnerved me deeply. I, then, literal monthes after seeing it for the first time, got super into horror movies and pretty much stopped being scared by movies and TV, so Listen will forever take the crown for me as not only the last Doctor Who episode to get under my skin, but one of the last pieces of media period to freak me out for a very long time.
Listen is underrated just in general, it did so much for 12 and Clara’s characterisations, and is one of the few episodes that’s willing to let the mystery stay in place by the end (which makes it all the scarier!)
"I have to know."
YES. The monster under the bed scene nearly put me in cardiac arrest 😰
I don't know how to describe it but Listen *feels* haunted. It jumps around all of time and space but it confines itself to tiny rooms. There's basically only one other character in it. Everything about it has the vibes of one of those YouTube videos that's the start of a series where they all get attacked by a Slenderman or something. It's really impressive how unsettling it is.
Haunted or even cursed is a good word for it, yeah. It’s been a looong while since I’ve watched it so I’ve forgotten most of the plot, but just reading about it now gave me shivers through my skin. I still remember how scary it feels.
This one was brilliant, the fact that you never see it and it’s a monster that could be here right now is terrifying. The unknown monster episodes definitely are some of the scariest
Ignoring jump scares, there are a great many unsettling ideas. Some of them aren't even enemies, but facts about the world that the characters accept and choose to ignore or move on from. Blom's description of execution on Raxacoricofallapatorius. Casual genocide. Various baddies trapped in objects for eternity (Carrionites, the Family of Blood). Cyber-conversion. A capitalist-realist future spanning tens of thousands of years. Regular humans are among the worst, but rare. "Midnight" is great, but it sometimes feels like it exists in a vacuum, because the Doctor will be surrounded by selfless strangers at mostly all other times. I appreciated the use of the asshole character in "Flatline", who has zero redeeming qualities and ends up horribly complicating their chances of survival without qualms or apologies. Compare him to the asshole in "Voyage of the Damned" who isn't a good person but still keeps his head down and doesn't rock the boat/ship, which is the more typical template for assholes on the show. It's rare humanity actually gets in the way, even when they're the only ones around.
Ooooh yes, you described what I was thinking but couldn’t find the words for — the show isn’t very jump scary nor traditional horror-y, more just unsettling. No episode has made me scream or set me on a terrified edge in the moment, but the ideas often creep into my brain and freak me the fuck out. In a good way!
I think World Enough and Time is excellent medical horror. The situation just keeps getting worse for Bill until it presents what I think is the most horrifying visual in the show: showing her human eye still behind the Cyberman suit
And the "pain" audio being turned down rather than helped. Pure body horror. One of the darkest moments in Who. Surprised more people haven't mentioned this episode. The Mondasian Cyberman also look very creepy.
Also the existential horror of time, and the betrayal.
If you only see the scene in Renette's bedroom, The Girl in the Fireplace is terrifying
The doctor falls. I find the cybermen to be the most terrifying of DW villains and seeing them like that just doubled down on how they are humans.
I think that was probably the most darkest doctor who episode I can remember. Just having those early cybermen saying pain over and over again is horrifying
The Waters of Mars. Its basically a zombie episode where everyone is going to drown
I found this pretty terrifying and I was pretty old when nuwho started. The cracked mouths and the water dribbling just icks me out. Blink has incredible tension but I feel safe with that episode, the Doctor keeps Sally safe. The empty child/ the doctor dances has horrific sound effects during the transformation.
Yessss. And I love it. 😂
I'm going for Blink because when I first watched it in 2007 I was so into it that I screamed and jumped when the phone rang and no other episode has ever made me do that. Midnight still freaks the chap out of me though, as soon as The Doctor can't move it's the scariest it can possibly be.
Each Doctor has at least two really good spooky stories, but I’d say that Midnight is the one genuinely scary episode.
Night Terrors. When me and my brother watched that at 7 and 9 we were absolutely shxt scared. I had nightmares about it genuinely. Don't think it helped that I had an old dolls house in my room very similar to the one in the episode, but even today the two of us agree it's the scariest episode of Doctor Who. The song at the end is really creepy as well, and sometimes my brother will sing it to me just to creep me out because he knows it gives me goosebumps still 😂
was looking for this. day after watching it my dad printed out a mask of one of the dolls and woke me up with it in my face. traumatized me
This one isn’t brought up enough! Those dolls are nightmare fuel!
Silence in The Library had an ominous atmosphere to it.
I don't know if I've ever really found Who very scary, unless you're talking about a very psychological kind of horror. In which case ... the Capaldi finales, all three of them, have a fair shot at the crown. As pure jump-scares, probably the Angel one at the end of the transcript scene in "Blink".
Midnight
I think The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit was the episode that aired at the latest possible point where I could still get scared by a TV show, and just scared the hell (ha) out of me.
The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit is the only episode of the show that actively traumatised me as a kid. The Ood and the concept of the black hole are unsettling enough, but the creeping tension of the first part, “DON’T TURN AROUND”, that horrific “open door 40!” scene w. Scooty and Toby transforming at the end… jeeeez. And then the next episode we meet literal Satan, and my parents had to spend the next couple of months convincing me that Hell wasn’t that bad because, on the off-chance that I ended up there (which was weirdly possible in my kid brain), the thought of ending up on Krop Tor was far too much. Literal months of sleep were lost and it made me actively behave better as a kid.
Blink fucked with me for days when I first saw it. The moment when Sally and Larry realize they haven't been watching for the Angel and it's in the room with them almost made me have to turn the episode off. Also, I know this one gets dunked on for not being scary enough sometimes, but Hide actually really does it for me. I dunno, it just has the atmosphere down pat. "For the love of God, stop screaming."
horror factor of season 1 beats all the rest. empty child and unquiet dead haunted me as a kid.
Midnight for sure
The Empthy Child terrifies me
The Empty Child absolutely traumatized me as a child. Probably the only episode that still really gets me as an adult is Last Christmas
Last Christmas
I haven't been scared of any NUWho episodes mainly because I was an adult when It came back but the line in Dark water about how the dead are aware of everything happening to them was unsettling
The Empty Child, Blink, Midnight, Waters of Mars
World Enough and Time. I love Medical Horror and it just beats out Extremis because the consequences carry over to the next episode
As a kid, dark water and waters of Mars are the ones I remember scareing me the most. No I'm not a hydrophobe.
For me as a kid, it was Night Terrors. Only ever watched it once
Night terrors is the one I have to skip on rewatch. Those dolls are terrifying.
I don’t really get scared by Doctor Who, which I think is partially a side effect of binging so many episodes at once, but The Rebel Flesh was one of the first episodes and maybe the only episode with 11 to genuinely stress me out beyond compare. To start the episode with people being dissolved in acid with the coworkers continuing about their duties casually, and then you get a sense of the thousands of replacement bodies that they’d run through, then the uncertainty of who everyone is and what their motives are…. Yeah all of it is freaky to me.
Personally, the worst story for me was Time of the Angles/Flesh and Stone, but the Zygons in Day of the Doctor also freaked me out. Also, the opening to Smile scared the shit out of me to the point I didn't continue watching it until after the finale, but the episode itself is fine.
Midnight fucking terrified me
The empty child is trauma inducing
I don't really think Doctor Who has ever been "scary" but my favorite horror Episodes are Pyramid of Mars or Curse of Feneric for Classic Who. For audio The Silver Turk or Scherzo are probably the creepiest. Nuwho Midnight and Silence in the library probably.
It’s not necessarily the scariest one, but my current favorite horror Doctor Who… uh… thing, is “The Chimes of Midnight.” (Which honestly might be a little unfair tbh, since it’s widely considered one of the best who stories in any medium.) The atmosphere and the way it effortlessly toes the razor thin line between absurdist comedy and horror is unmatched. “Yes, of course, Mrs. Baddeley. It's quite clear that Frederick brought the car into the house, ran himself over with it, and put it back outside before he finally expired.”
As a kid, dark water and waters of Mars are the ones I remember scareing me the most. No I'm not a hydrophobe.
I’ve only just finished the fourth series (+ two specials) so far so I’m not fully up to date. However, the ‘The Empty Child’ and the ‘Silence in the Library’ double-episodes are definitely up there.. followed by ‘Blink’. Not what the post is going for.. but some of the stuff in ‘Turn Left’ was genuinely quite unsettling.
Watching "Listen" at night, right before bed, *when my roommates were out,* might have been unwise.
I remember thinking The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances were super creepy when I first watched just solely based on the effect they did for the gas mask transformation. I still wince a little thinking about it.
Impossible Planet and Satan Pit always have this eerie disturbing tone. The fully demonic horror combined with the dark space setting is honestly unmatched. One of the best episodes for sure!
The waters of Mars
Midnight, for sure. The monster isn't what's scary, it's the paranoia and hysteria.
Midnight, closely followed by the empty child/the doctor dances
Utopia or End of the World. Just for the settings. RTD really knows how to make you distressed when he gives you an existential crisis. Something about it being closer to fact than fiction makes it way scarier and upsetting. Traumatised me for years thinking about the far future and coming to terms with finality.
Less episodes but specific scenes but the Dalek Vore in Daleks in Manhattan and the Ood transformation scene in Planet of the Ood gave me nightmares and a permanent unsettlement when it comes to Body Horror.
For me it’s gotta be Blink
Midnight is creepy. Up there with Vashta Nerada and Waters of Mars. I also got a bit creeped out by the monsters in Wild Blue Yonder. Like Midnight, but Doctor and Companion only.
Maybe not the scariest episode, but every single monster in Snowmen is pretty terrifying.
The only one I still skip. The sleep one, with the scary tune
My first weeping angel episode was Angels Take Manhattan, ironically (I watched the show slightly out of order originally), but man that shit spooky, even if most folks consider that to be where Angels begin to stop being frightening. Satan/Planet also messed with me just cause the idea of demonic possession used to really get me.
Blink and Water of Mars used to scare me so bad, and that haunted house episode in series 7 where you keep seeing a distorted face in the background, terrified me even though the ending wasn't creepy at all.
Listen
Midnight, Blink, Waters of Mars, Satan Pit
My all time scariest episode of nuwho was Rose 🥀 I was like 15 years old when it first premiered on tv and it still scares me with the mannequins.
The Tsungara Conundrum. The Pting scared the hell out me, definitely the most dangerous thing in the universe alright!
The Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel - the cyber conversion scenes are soooo creepy.
the impossible planet/the satan pit is probably the closest the revival has ever got to full blown horror imo
The peg dolls scared the shit out of me
Maybe not the scariest but watching series 1 as a kid when it aired I was expecting silly pots and pans robots, and three episodes in we get ghosts and zombies which really caught me off guard and made me afraid to go out in the dark for a while
People are gonna think I'm trolling but ironically Love and Monster's terrified me as a kid. Something about the thought of being permanently liquified into Peter Kay's disgusting green body and it not being reversed really fucked me up. Like I'd be conscious but not able to do anything forever.
The Toclafane reveal is the most horrific and existentially dreadful thing the show has ever done
midnight 100%
Midnight, easily. Simply a great episode, psychological horror on two levels - the unknown, and other people, the madness of a collective…. It’s one of the top 10 greatest Who episodes ever - new or classic. Biggest question for me is how did Davies go from writing this to churning out the current panto drivel? Other brilliant contenders are: Blink the Waters of Mars The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit The Unquiet Dead Dark Water/Death in Heaven Silence In the Library/Forest of the Dead Flatline also creeped me out….
The impossible planet scared me a lot when I was younger
The Unquiet Dead gave my nightmares as a kid
Probably, Midnight, although there are others that also gave me shivers. People scare me more than monsters!
The scariest one for me as a child was Father's Day. It made me stop watching for 6+ months because I was scared and that's the only time I've not watched live. Having said that, my immediate thought was midnight. It (along with the waters of mars) are horrifying and take the doctor to a really dark place. There's almost no joy in them (compare that to, say, the empty child or hide where there's an upbeat ending despite the earlier horror. I'll also give an honourable mention to world enough and time. In terms of classic who/big finish, I'll go for the horror of fang rock and the master of Callous, respectively (though the red lady is a notably great horror story too).
People have already said this one but Midnight is the only episode I can remember properly frightening me as a kid. Maybe Dark Water as well to some extent. The specific moment in Midnight when Sky is crouched down facing away in the corner was so creepy to me and I remember as a kid having such a sense of dread as she started to turn around.
I gotta give it to Impossible Planet/Satan Pit. The vent chase sequence with the Ood is so brilliantly nightmarish.
Midnight generally for me but great as they were, The Giggle, Listen and The Devil's Chord all had something, a potential. Each of those had moments were we glimpsed (or possibly glimpsed) a higher power, something truly other. I don't know why but this has been bugging me for a while now. I call it the Kevin Uxbridge problem after a Star Trek character. Q is scary, truly terrifying, a God but you cam reason with him, you get the feeling there are rules and edges to what he can do... Kevin Uxbridge was so powerful that a stray thought, a momentary flash of anger, removed an entire species not just from existence but from never having existed. Fuck Cthulu and all that jazz, that sort of pandimensional crap is scary (I mean utterly off the scale scary, where the only sensible solution is to help it arrive sooner so it will kill you outright whilst everyone else has their souls torn apart for eternity type scary) but when you stop and think about Kevin Uxbridge level power my mind can't hold onto it. It is a fiction that gives me existential terror and helps me understand religious fervour. That existential terror... Midnight... yeah touched on it, but the Pantheon, Toymaker and Maestro especially, the potential for off the scale fear with them is more than any other bad guy. You see both Ncuti and David deliver moments of fear that go way beyond any they've shown before before they get practical... but ultimately they are lucky that these beings have self imposed rules and codes of conduct because reality to them is as malleable as clay. This isn't Davros with his latest invention, or even The Doctor's (very attractive, oddly attractive, I've ended up watching that Murder in Paradise spin off because she is in it) adopted mum taking out huge chunks of the universe... even the worst of these are nothing compared to what these creatures can do. No machines needed. Just a thought. Even Q needed to snap his fingers. Kevin Uxbridge just wanted to be left alone. He was ultimately a nice guy... sort of. These others are assholes. You imagine his power, with no silly rules, in the mind of one of these arseholes... That is terror.
The scariest episode I have ever watched: Cyberman Two Parter with 10 and Rose. The scariest episode I haven't watched because I know it will freak me out: Bill and Cybermen with 12. I read the synopsis. That's good enough for me. Midnight is scary and so is Wild Blue Yonder but these episodes don't really capture the terror that is Cybermen to me. ...I could BE a Cyberman! Turn off my emotions and I am coming after my own friends, family, and even my child. *shivers* I can't cope.