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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, complete with grating by Jungle of Skaro.
01:43And if that wasn't bad enough, things were pretty grim behind the scenes too.
01:46Aside from the pressure of being the first Doctor Who story to go before cameras,
01:50there were all manner of unsavoury set dressings to contend with.
01:53Shrubbery ridden with insects, fur skins ridden with fleas,
01:57and for the Cave of Skull set, countless replica skulls,
02:00with some real bones thrown in for good measure.
02:02Yep, that's right, Doctor Who's first ever story featured actual human bones
02:06sourced from an abattoir.
02:08As you can imagine, under those hot studio lights,
02:10they didn't exactly smell like roses.
02:12A stark reminder of how different production standards were in the 60s compared to today.
02:17Could you imagine if that's what they did today?
02:18Number 8, The Landlord's Nightmare
02:21With its creepy-crawlies wooden lady and omniscient landlord,
02:25Knock Knock is one of the most unsettling Doctor Who stories in recent years.
02:29But like the best haunted house stories,
02:30it's the tragedy rather than the scariness that unnerves you the most.
02:34In a shock twist, we learn that the spooky happenings at 11 Cardinal Road
02:37are the result of the landlord trying to protect his mother,
02:41with the house absorbing its tenants to extend her lifespan.
02:43The only way this twisted tale can end is with a mercy killing,
02:46with Eliza sacrificing herself and her son to the lice.
02:50This scene required little acting from David Suchet,
02:53who had found himself in a similar predicament 50 years earlier.
02:56As he recalled on Doctor Who The Fan Show,
02:58he once rented a room in Liverpool with nothing more than a horsehair mattress
03:01and an old woolly coat in the way of bedding.
03:04On one occasion, the young Suchet went to bed,
03:06only to wake up covered in wood lice.
03:09Being able to pull on a memory that traumatic clearly aided Suchet's performance,
03:13and it makes it even tougher to watch when you know that something similar
03:16actually happened to him in real life.
03:18Number 7. The Drunken Yeti
03:20The Yeti were one of 60s Who's most memorable monsters,
03:23and together with the Cybermen and the Ice Warriors,
03:26spooked a whole generation of children.
03:28And as it turns out, life playing a Yeti was just as terrifying.
03:31One scene of their mostly missing debut story, The Abominable Snowmen,
03:35involved a particularly precarious moment.
03:38As Professor Travers actor Jack Watling recalled in an interview,
03:41he said,
03:41There was a low-angle shot, with us looking up at the Yeti on the horizon.
03:45Suddenly, one of those Yeti fell off.
03:47He bounced hundreds of feet down.
03:49We thought he's killed himself.
03:51Fortunately, the actor in question was perfectly fine.
03:53Amazingly, his seemingly fatal fall had been cushioned by the foam rubber of his Yeti costume.
03:58As for why he'd taken a tumble?
04:00Well, the cast reportedly enjoyed a drink or two between takes.
04:04A robot Yeti roaming the Himalayas is terrifying enough,
04:07but a drunk robot Yeti roaming the Himalayas scarcely bears thinking about.
04:11No wonder they left this moment out of the animated reconstruction.
04:15Number 6. Doctor Who's Pandemic Parallel
04:17Despite being produced pre-Covid,
04:20Revolution of the Daleks featured some rather timely imagery,
04:23with the Doctor locked in prison and forced to self-isolate from her fam.
04:27Flux was the first series of Doctor Who to be produced in a post-Covid world,
04:31and also featured parallels to the pandemic.
04:33But on this occasion, they were completely intentional.
04:36Most notably, the Flux itself was inspired by Covid,
04:39as former showrunner Chris Chibnall recently confirmed, saying,
04:42I mean, Flux is a metaphor for Covid.
04:43There's a big thing coming for you,
04:45a massive thing that's going to disrupt all life as you know it.
04:48This was implied in the episodes themselves,
04:50with Belle's opening monologue in Once Upon Time being a clear giveaway.
04:54The biggest changes to our lives start small.
04:57Catastrophes creeping quietly,
04:58and by the time you realise,
05:00the life you once had is already behind you.
05:02The Flux has much in common with Covid beyond this.
05:05It's relentless, deadly,
05:06and takes many prisoners with those that do survive
05:09finding themselves in a world that has changed forever.
05:11And Tectae Yoon explicitly refers to the Doctor as a virus.
05:15Anything too explicit would have been an unwelcome reality check
05:19in a show that's supposed to be escapism.
05:21But it was inevitable that the circumstances affecting Flux's production
05:24were going to creep into the scripts one way or another.
05:27Number 5. The Sheriff's Secret
05:29For Doctor Who's Robin Hood episode,
05:31writer Mark Gatiss paid homage to the 1980s drama Robin of Sherwood,
05:36choosing the title Robot of Sherwood.
05:38This was a reference to Robin's nemesis, the Sheriff of Nottingham,
05:42who, in a shock twist during the final battle,
05:44was originally supposed to be decapitated and exposed as a cyborg.
05:47This key moment was cut from the finished episode
05:49in truly tragic circumstances.
05:52In the months leading up to the broadcast,
05:54headlines were dominated by the terrorist group ISIS,
05:56who had been releasing horrific beheading videos online.
05:59And just days before Robot of Sherwood was due to go out,
06:02the group claimed their latest victim,
06:04US journalist Stephen Sotloff.
06:06Less than 48 hours later,
06:08the BBC announced that an edit had been made to the episode.
06:11And because early cuts of the first five Series 8 episodes had leaked earlier that summer,
06:16fans were able to quickly put two and two together.
06:19Sure enough, when Robot of Sherwood aired,
06:21the decapitation scene present in the early cut,
06:23which can still be viewed online,
06:25was absent.
06:26It was completely out of the team's control,
06:28but nevertheless cast a saddening shadow over the episode.
06:32Number 4. Milne takes a tumble
06:34Black Orchid isn't just any old historical,
06:37it's a pure historical.
06:39As such, the villain is not some alien menace,
06:41but the entirely human George Cranley.
06:44Cranley's disfigurement,
06:45the result of a run-in with an Amazonian tribe
06:47on a search for the titular Black Orchid,
06:49is unfortunate,
06:50particularly in light of the recent Davros discourse.
06:53Likewise, the idea that the experience
06:54should leave him deranged and murderous is questionable.
06:57Regardless, this is the direction the story goes in,
07:00concluding with Cranley having a fatal fall
07:02from the roof of his family home.
07:04It's a sticky end,
07:05and as Peter Davison recalled on the episode's DVD commentary,
07:08it was almost as painful for the actor playing Cranley,
07:11Gareth Milne,
07:11whose stunt went horribly wrong.
07:13Davison recalled,
07:14you can actually see him push off too far
07:16as he goes off the side of the roof.
07:18Half of him missed the boxes,
07:19and his legs went slapping into the concrete.
07:21It was a very, very nasty moment.
07:23I don't think he broke anything,
07:25but he was very badly bruised.
07:26To this day,
07:27there have never been any more pure historicals.
07:30Can't think why.
07:31Number 3. Ood conversion.
07:32It's not just the way a monster looks that makes them scary.
07:36It's the reason they look the way they do.
07:37This was the case for the Suited Silence,
07:39the Cloth-Faced Mondassian Cybermen,
07:41and the Bandaged Foretold.
07:43It was also the case for the Ood,
07:44not because of their mottled skin and pink fronds,
07:47but because of their translation orbs,
07:49which are stitched into them by the Merciless Ood operations.
07:52It's an ironic name for a company that literally performs surgery on its workforce,
07:57removing their secondary hind brains to make the necessary alterations.
08:01It's a grim thought,
08:02but the Ood as we know them have been mutilated.
08:05Planet of the Ood writer Keith Temple originally planned to make this more explicit,
08:09with a sequence set inside the abattoir-like conversion centre.
08:13Though deemed too horrific for the finished episode,
08:16this material was reinstated in the recent Planet of the Ood novelisation,
08:20which reads,
08:21The hydraulic system of surgical devices hanging above the conveyor belt a short distance away
08:25had one purpose,
08:27to amputate natural Ood's hind brains.
08:29So if you thought that Donna went through the ringer seeing the Ood in the cage,
08:32well, her trip to the Ood sphere was nearly much more harrowing.
08:35Number 2.
08:36The Toymaker's Curse
08:37The Toymaker is currently plaguing the Doctor and his friends,
08:41just as he did 57 years ago.
08:43And on that occasion,
08:44his influence extended far beyond the episodes themselves.
08:47During his debut story,
08:49the Toymaker forces the Doctor to complete the Trilogic Game,
08:52a puzzle that involves moving a 10-layer pyramid from one point to another,
08:56one piece at a time,
08:58all in less than 1,023 moves.
09:01The Celestial Toymaker was a favourite story of Stephen actor Peter Purves,
09:04and so the Trilogic Game prop was gifted to him as a memento.
09:08However, following his departure from the series a couple of stories later,
09:11Purves struggled to get work.
09:13He came to see the prop as the source of his bad luck,
09:15so much so that he decided to throw it away.
09:18Things got even spookier, though,
09:19when the very next day,
09:20Purves was offered work for the first time in ages,
09:23apart in the BBC police procedural Zed Cars.
09:26Within weeks, he was also a presenter on Blue Peter,
09:29a show that would keep him in steady employment for the next 11 years.
09:32Could the Toymaker's Curse strike again?
09:34If Catherine Tate steals a prop,
09:35chucks it away,
09:36and then ends up becoming the next Blue Peter presenter,
09:38don't be surprised.
09:39Number 1.
09:40Hyde's Haunted House
09:41Doctor Who has had its fair share of haunted houses over the years,
09:45and some of them are just as creepy in real life.
09:47Fields House in Newport,
09:49which became the weeping angel-infested Wester Drumlins in Blink,
09:52and later the landlord's premises in Knock Knock,
09:55really was in a sorry state when the crew filmed there,
09:57and thus required little work from the art department.
10:00Similarly, the disused custom house on Cardiff's Butch Street,
10:04which appeared in The Caretaker,
10:05is not somewhere you'd want to find yourself alone on a dark night.
10:08But none of these beats the haunted house that really is haunted.
10:12In 2013's Hyde,
10:14the Doctor and Clara find themselves at Caliburn House,
10:17where a professor and his assistant are trying to solve the mystery of the Witch of the Well.
10:21One of the locations used was the 19th century gothic mansion Margum Castle,
10:26which has reportedly received visitations of its own,
10:29from a murdered gamekeeper,
10:31a burly blacksmith,
10:32and giggling Victorian children.
10:34Spooky.
10:35In-universe, the Witch was actually a trapped space traveller
10:38trying to escape from a pocket universe,
10:40but Margum's real-life hauntings remain unexplained to this very day.
10:46Ooh.
10:47And that's everything for this list,
10:49but for some more spooky Doctor Who stories,
10:51then check out 10 Real Things That Prove Doctor Who Exists.
10:55In the meantime, I've been Ellie with Who Culture,
10:57and in the words of Riversong herself,
10:59goodbye, sweeties.
11:01Stay tuned.
11:01Okay.
11:02Bye.
11:17fast.
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