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From haunted houses to real bones, some Doctor Who moments are even scarier than they look.
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00:00Doctor Who has had viewers hiding behind the sofa since 1963.
00:04The Daleks, Chief Clown, Peg Dolls and Miss Evangelista have given both kids and adults sleepless nights.
00:10But some of the scariest things about the show come from beyond the TV screen.
00:15I'm Ellie for Who Culture and this is 10 Doctor Who Scenes More Terrifying When You Know The Truth.
00:21Number 10. The Tragedy of Sky Silvestri
00:24As the host of the mysterious Midnight Entity, Sky Silvestri is utterly terrifying.
00:29But in the moments before she gets possessed, she's pretty terrified herself.
00:33It's hard not to feel sorry for her as she retreats into the corner of the Crusader 50
00:37knowing the creature has picked her as its first victim.
00:40And given that she's been dumped by her partner, she's not exactly in the best mental state to begin with.
00:44And that's putting it mildly.
00:46Even if the Midnight Entity hadn't struck, her trip would have still been tinged with tragedy
00:50because upon reaching her destination, the Sapphire Waterfall, Sky was actually planning to kill herself.
00:56This extra bit of backstory isn't explicit in the script.
00:59But as Russell T. Davis revealed on the episode's DVD commentary,
01:02there's one crucial line that gives the game away.
01:05Russell commented,
01:06She's on her way to a waterfall palace, but she says I'm on a schedule.
01:10Which is like, what for?
01:11What on earth are you going to a waterfall on a schedule for?
01:14Midnight is a scary episode as it is,
01:16but knowing that this was going on in the background,
01:18and is potentially why the Entity picked Sky in the first place,
01:21makes it a whole lot darker, doesn't it?
01:23Number 9. The Cave of Actual Skulls
01:26Doctor Who's second serial, the Daleks, saw the Doctor face his most enduring enemy for the first time.
01:31However, debut instalment An Unearthly Child had sent the nascent TARDIS travellers
01:36to an environment that was arguably just as hostile.
01:39The Daleks might be proper monsters,
01:41complete with grating voices and metal tanks,
01:43but cavemen aren't much better.
01:45Nor is prehistoric Earth much better than the petrified jungle of Skaro.
01:49And if that wasn't bad enough, things were pretty grim behind the scenes too.
01:52Aside from the pressure of being the first Doctor Who story to go before cameras,
01:56there were all manner of unsavoury set dressings to contend with.
01:59Shrubbery ridden with insects, fur skins ridden with fleas,
02:03and for the Cave of Skull set, countless replica skulls,
02:06with some real bones thrown in for good measure.
02:08Yep, that's right, Doctor Who's first ever story featured actual human bones
02:12sought from an abattoir.
02:14As you can imagine, under those hot studio lights,
02:16they didn't exactly smell like roses.
02:18A stark reminder of how different production standards were in the 60s compared to today.
02:23Could you imagine if that's what they did today?
02:25Ooh.
02:25Number 8.
02:26The Landlord's Nightmare
02:27With its creepy-crawlies wooden lady and omniscient landlord,
02:31Knock Knock is one of the most unsettling Doctor Who stories in recent years.
02:35But like the best haunted house stories,
02:36it's the tragedy rather than the scariness that unnerves you the most.
02:40In a shock twist, we learn that the spooky happenings at 11 Cardinal Road
02:43are the result of the landlord trying to protect his mother.
02:46With the house absorbing its tenants to extend her lifespan.
02:50The only way this twisted tale can end is with a mercy killing,
02:52with Eliza sacrificing herself and her son to the lice.
02:56This scene required little acting from David Suchet,
02:59who had found himself in a similar predicament 50 years earlier.
03:02As he recalled on Doctor Who The Fan Show,
03:04he once rented a room in Liverpool with nothing more than a horsehair mattress
03:07and an old woolly coat in the way of bedding.
03:10On one occasion, the young Suchet went to bed,
03:12only to wake up covered in wood lice.
03:15Being able to pull on a memory that traumatic clearly aided Suchet's performance,
03:19and it makes it even tougher to watch when you know
03:21that something similar actually happened to him in real life.
03:24Number 7, The Drunken Yeti
03:26The Yeti were one of 60s Who's most memorable monsters,
03:29and together with the Cybermen and the Ice Warriors,
03:32spooked a whole generation of children.
03:34And as it turns out, life playing a Yeti was just as terrifying.
03:38One scene of their mostly missing debut story,
03:40The Abominable Snowmen involved a particularly precarious moment.
03:44As Professor Travers actor Jack Watling recalled in an interview,
03:47he said,
03:47There was a low angle shot,
03:49with us looking up at the Yeti on the horizon.
03:51Suddenly, one of those Yeti fell off.
03:53He bounced hundreds of feet down.
03:55We thought he's killed himself.
03:57Fortunately, the actor in question was perfectly fine.
03:59Amazingly, his seemingly fatal fall had been cushioned
04:02by the foam rubber of his Yeti costume.
04:04As for why he'd taken a tumble?
04:06Well, the cast reportedly enjoyed a drink or two between takes.
04:10A robot Yeti roaming the Himalayas is terrifying enough,
04:13but a drunk robot Yeti roaming the Himalayas
04:15scarcely bears thinking about.
04:17No wonder they left this moment out of the animated reconstruction.
04:21Number six, Doctor Who's Pandemic Parallel.
04:24Despite being produced pre-Covid,
04:26Revolution of the Daleks featured some rather timely imagery,
04:29with the Doctor locked in prison
04:30and forced to self-isolate from her fam.
04:33Flux was the first series of Doctor Who to be produced in a post-Covid world,
04:37and also featured parallels to the pandemic.
04:39But on this occasion, they were completely intentional.
04:42Most notably, the Flux itself was inspired by Covid,
04:45as former showrunner Chris Chibnall recently confirmed, saying,
04:48I mean, Flux is a metaphor for Covid.
04:49There's a big thing coming for you,
04:51a massive thing that's going to disrupt all life as you know it.
04:54This was implied in the episodes themselves,
04:56with Belle's opening monologue in Once Upon Time being a clear giveaway.
05:00The biggest changes to our lives start small.
05:03Catastrophes creeping quietly,
05:04and by the time you realise,
05:06the life you once had is already behind you.
05:08The Flux has much in common with Covid beyond this.
05:11It's relentless, deadly,
05:12and takes many prisoners with those that do survive
05:15finding themselves in a world that has changed forever.
05:17And Tectayune explicitly refers to the Doctor as a virus.
05:22Anything too explicit would have been an unwelcome reality check
05:25in a show that's supposed to be escapism.
05:27But it was inevitable that the circumstances affecting Flux's production
05:30were going to creep into the scripts one way or another.
05:33Number 5.
05:34The Sheriff's Secret
05:35For Doctor Who's Robin Hood episode,
05:37writer Mark Gatiss paid homage to the 1980s drama Robin of Sherwood,
05:42choosing the title Robot of Sherwood.
05:44This was a reference to Robin's nemesis,
05:46the Sheriff of Nottingham,
05:48who, in a shock twist during the final battle,
05:50was originally supposed to be decapitated and exposed as a cyborg.
05:53This key moment was cut from the finished episode
05:55in truly tragic circumstances.
05:58In the months leading up to the broadcast,
06:00headlines were dominated by the terrorist group ISIS,
06:02who had been releasing horrific beheading videos online.
06:05And just days before Robot of Sherwood was due to go out,
06:08the group claimed their latest victim,
06:10US journalist Stephen Sotloff.
06:12Less than 48 hours later,
06:14the BBC announced that an edit had been made to the episode.
06:17And because early cuts of the first five Series 8 episodes
06:20had leaked earlier that summer,
06:22fans were able to quickly put two and two together.
06:25Sure enough, when Robot of Sherwood aired,
06:27the decapitation scene present in the early cut,
06:29which can still be viewed online,
06:31was absent.
06:32It was completely out of the team's control,
06:34but nevertheless cast a saddening shadow over the episode.
06:38Number four, Milne takes a tumble.
06:40Black Orchid isn't just any old historical,
06:43it's a pure historical.
06:45As such, the villain is not some alien menace,
06:47but the entirely human George Cranley.
06:50Cranley's disfigurement,
06:51the result of a run-in with an Amazonian tribe
06:53on a search for the titular Black Orchid,
06:55is unfortunate, particularly in light of the recent Davros discourse.
06:59Likewise, the idea that the experience should leave him deranged and murderous
07:02is questionable.
07:03Regardless, this is the direction the story goes in,
07:06concluding with Cranley having a fatal fall from the roof of his family home.
07:10It's a sticky end,
07:11and as Peter Davison recalled on the episode's DVD commentary,
07:14it was almost as painful for the actor playing Cranley,
07:17Gareth Milne,
07:17whose stunt went horribly wrong.
07:19Davison recalled,
07:20you can actually see him push off too far as he goes off the side of the roof.
07:24Half of him missed the boxes,
07:25and his legs went slapping into the concrete.
07:27It was a very, very nasty moment.
07:29I don't think he broke anything,
07:31but he was very badly bruised.
07:32And to this day,
07:33there have never been any more pure historicals.
07:36Can't think why.
07:37Number three,
07:37Ood conversion.
07:39It's not just the way a monster looks that makes them scary,
07:42it's the reason they look the way they do.
07:43This was the case for the suited silence,
07:45the cloth-faced Mondasian Cybermen,
07:47and the bandage foretold.
07:49It was also the case for the Ood,
07:50not because of their mottled skin and pink fronds,
07:53but because of their translation orbs,
07:55which are stitched into them by the merciless Ood operations.
07:58It's an ironic name for a company that literally performs surgery on its workforce,
08:03removing their secondary hind brains to make the necessary alterations.
08:07It's a grim thought,
08:08but the Ood as we know them have been mutilated.
08:11Planet of the Ood writer Keith Temple originally planned to make this more explicit,
08:15with a sequence set inside the abattoir-like conversion centre.
08:19Though deemed too horrific for the finished episode,
08:22this material was reinstated in the recent Planet of the Ood novelisation,
08:26which reads,
08:26The hydraulic system of surgical devices,
08:29hanging above the conveyor belt a short distance away,
08:32had one purpose,
08:33to amputate natural Ood's hind brains.
08:35So if you thought that Donna went through the ringer seeing the Ood in the cage,
08:38well, her trip to the Ood sphere was nearly much more harrowing.
08:41Number two,
08:42The Toymaker's Curse
08:43The Toymaker is currently plaguing the Doctor and his friends,
08:47just as he did 57 years ago.
08:49And on that occasion,
08:50his influence extended far beyond the episodes themselves.
08:53During his debut story,
08:55the Toymaker forces the Doctor to complete the Trilogic Game,
08:58a puzzle that involves moving a 10-layer pyramid from one point to another,
09:02one piece at a time,
09:04all in less than 1,023 moves.
09:07The Celestial Toymaker was a favourite story of Stephen, actor Peter Purps,
09:10and so the Trilogic Game prop was gifted to him as a memento.
09:14However,
09:14following his departure from the series a couple of stories later,
09:17Purves struggled to get work.
09:19He came to see the prop as the source of his bad luck,
09:21so much so that he decided to throw it away.
09:24Things got even spookier, though,
09:25when the very next day,
09:26Purves was offered work for the first time in ages,
09:29apart in the BBC police procedural Zed Cars.
09:32Within weeks,
09:33he was also a presenter on Blue Peter,
09:35a show that would keep him in steady employment for the next 11 years.
09:38Could the Toymaker's Curse strike again?
09:40If Catherine Tate steals a prop,
09:41chucks it away,
09:42and then ends up becoming the next Blue Peter presenter,
09:44don't be surprised.
09:45Number 1,
09:46Hyde's Haunted House.
09:48Doctor Who has had its fair share of haunted houses over the years,
09:51and some of them are just as creepy in real life.
09:53Fields House in Newport,
09:55which became the Weeping Angel-infested Wester Drumlins in Blink,
09:58and later the Landlord's Premises in Knock Knock,
10:01really was in a sorry state when the crew filmed there,
10:03and thus required little work from the art department.
10:06Similarly, the disused custom house on Cardiff's Butch Street,
10:10which appeared in The Caretaker,
10:12is not somewhere you'd want to find yourself alone on a dark night.
10:15But none of these beats the haunted house that really is haunted.
10:18In 2013's Hyde,
10:20the Doctor and Clara find themselves at Caliburn House,
10:23where a professor and his assistant are trying to solve the mystery of the Witch of the Well.
10:27One of the locations used was the 19th century Gothic mansion Margum Castle,
10:32which has reportedly received visitations of its own,
10:35from a murdered gamekeeper,
10:37a burly blacksmith,
10:38and giggling Victorian children.
10:40Spooky.
10:41In-universe,
10:42the Witch was actually a trapped space traveller trying to escape from a pocket universe,
10:46but Margum's real-life hauntings remain unexplained to this very day.
10:52Ooh.
10:52And that's everything for this list.
10:55But for some more spooky Doctor Who stories,
10:57then check out 10 Real Things That Prove Doctor Who Exists.
11:01In the meantime,
11:02I've been Ellie with Who Culture,
11:03and in the words of Riversong herself,
11:05goodbye, sweeties.
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