Steven Moffat breaks down Doctor Who's scariest and silliest monsters
The former showrunner chats Daleks, Weeping Angels and the Empty Child for our Halloween special of 60 Days of Doctor Who.
Picture the scene: it's Saturday night, it's dark outside, and a Steven Moffat-penned episode of Doctor Who is about to start on BBC One. The chances are you're going to end up with plenty of fuel for your nightmares.
The former showrunner, who helmed Doctor Who from 2010 to 2017, has been terrifying us as far back as season 1 with The Empty Child and is the brain behind some of the series' scariest villains.
Speaking to RadioTimes.com, the show's monster-maker broke down some of its most iconic creatures – and the one flaw they all share. Ready to revisit your worst nightmares?
"It's something of the nursery somehow, there's something rather domestic about a Doctor Who monster," Moffat explains.
"They're not, if you look at the famously scary ones, tremendously convincing in the combat zone. The Weeping Angels, which are the my most successful ones, I mean, they can't move if someone sees them!
"What kind of invasion force is that?! They're kind of nuts but children are scared of statues – I remember being scared of statues and, in particular, shop dummies but Robert Holmes had already done that one.
"The Daleks, he's the greatest genius in the world, apparently, Davros. Is he? Is he? What do you think of that design?" he jokes. "I mean, seriously, I don't think that was a brilliant design. It's a brilliant design for a monster on TV, but as a machine, I've got notes Davros! I really do. It's silly, isn't it? What's that arm supposed to be?!
"How did the scientific elite of Skaro let that one pass when Davros – a week before he unveiled the Dalek gun, he must have unveiled the Dalek arm.
"Did they stand around in confusion or did they applaud and say 'Yeah, great idea. Let's not have fingers. Let's have a sink plunger.' Awesome, Davros, well done you. Storming genius.
"So there's something fundamentally silly about a great Doctor Who monster and something of the nursery. Kids have a strange relationship with the Daleks because they're sort of frightened of them, but they're like their favourite toys. There's something loveable about a Dalek, and frightening.
"So I think embracing the fairytale nursery absurdity that goes along with a certain kind of creepiness, a kind of harmless creepiness. We don't go in for a lot of gore in Doctor Who. People don't get their heads ripped off or anything nasty. It's all a bit children's ghost story – and quite right too."
So what about his first Doctor Who monster, the iconic Empty Child?
"The brief was a World War Two setting," he recalls. "Some kind of child monster, I think was the idea, hiding among the craters of the Blitz and, and to introduce Captain Jack [Harkness, played by John Barrowman] of course. But I remember thinking, the moment I introduce a monster, no one's gonna pay any attention to the setting.
"By introducing the clanking robot, you forget where it's put, that becomes irrelevant. So I thought we should really – and this is a good way of approaching Doctor Who – fashion the monster out of the iconography of the era.
"So I went and looked at all the pictures of the Blitz and, of course, the thing that really strikes you is all the ruddy gas masks. Gas masks are a Doctor Who monster, they've got blank eyes. That's kind of all you need really, blank eyes.
"So I wanted to make a monster out of the iconography of World War Two and the gas masks were the obvious one to go for. I think Russell wanted it to be a child monster, and for there to be children – which was true by the way – living in the Blitz, stealing from houses during air raids. That all happened. That was real."
Doctor Who's top 10 scariest monsters
10. The Beast
Appearing in 2006 episodes The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, The Beast may have been the devil, or some other ancient god, or the inspiration for them all – but his penchant for possessing other beings and scary calligraphy have certainly lingered in fans’ minds.
9. Mondasian Cybermen
The original take on the Doctor’s cyborg foes returned to Doctor Who in 2017, where the truth behind their unusual look – essentially, their transformation was more surgical than mechanical – was revealed in some seriously creepy scenes.
8. Cybermen
An unstoppable metal army, accrued from the violated bodies of men and determined to spread their vision across the galaxy? In Doctor Who, it’s not even top five material.
7. The Silence
These creepy, grey-headed aliens are hard to forget – unless of course you’re one of their victims, in which case they’re impossible to remember. Time to scratch a few more marks on your arm and just hope there’s not still one lurking behind you.
6. The Flood
Constantly dripping and flowing with water and with gaping, crack-mouthed grins to go with their white eyes, the “water zombies” of the episode are definitely one of the scariest-looking Doctor Who monsters in the modern series.
5. Vashta Nerada
In 2008’s Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, Steven Moffat created a truly unstoppable foe – living shadows, called the Vashta Nerada, who feasted on the flesh of the living and who raged through a deserted library in space.
4. Gas mask zombies
Gas-masked, unstoppable and constantly crying for his mummy in a sing-song voice, this particular Doctor Who threat was liable to give you shivers for days – and that was even before you could see how his affliction was passed on to others, most notably One Foot in the Grave’s Richard Wilson.
3. The Midnight Creature
Beginning with simple knocks on the outside of the Doctor and his co-passengers’ vessel, before possessing Sky Silvestry (Lesley Sharp) and mimicking the speech of others, the Midnight Creature (which is never named) is as much a psychological threat as a physical one.
Soon, the passengers are their own worst enemies as they turn on each other out of fear, including considering throwing the Doctor out of the vessel at one point, and when the monster is eventually thrown out it still leaves some major damage in its wake.
2. The Daleks
The original monster to send audiences scurrying behind the sofa, the Daleks have appeared in more episodes than any other monster, become design icons, been parodied, mocked and riffed on in countless ways.
Despite so many appearances over the years, they've still got Doctor Who fans hiding behind cushions. Credit to Davros, because that’s some good brand awareness. Though not quite good enough to unseat our winner...
1. The Weeping Angels
Accessing a primal fear that many of us may not have even known we had, the living statue angels – who can only move, and strike, when you’re not looking at them – are genuinely disturbing, their jerky, stop-motion-like attacks between blinks and flashes of light (usually accompanied by loud music cues) making from some terrifying TV.
While they've returned various times, they’ve never been more effective than they were in that spine-chilling first outing and plenty of us have never quite recovered.
For Moffat, the Doctor Who fear factor also comes from the show being inherently different to other sci-fis.
"It takes place under your bed, and in the back of your cupboard. That's where it belongs. It doesn't take you to outer space. It brings outer space behind your sofa and frightens you with it. Even when Doctor Who is at its most epic, it always becomes a little bit domestic as well.
"It's living room scale menace, it's quite important to Doctor Who. I suppose that was originally a budgetary constraint that it had to be like that. The show no longer has quite the same budgetary restraints – it's hardly over-funded, but it doesn't have the same budgetary restraints – the style of show should evolve to cope with that.
"The slight homeliness of it all is a really good way of connecting with your audience. If you think the monsters are in outer space in metal corridors, well, that's not so frightening. But if you think the monsters are of the right size and type to creep into your living room, then that's frightening – frightening in a in a proper, kid friendly way, in a nice way.
"Kids love ghost stories, not in a disturbing, harrowing way – we leave that to Newsnight."
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Authors
Louise Griffin is the Sci-Fi & Fantasy Editor for Radio Times, covering everything from Doctor Who, Star Wars and Marvel to House of the Dragon and Good Omens. She previously worked at Metro as a Senior Entertainment Reporter and has a degree in English Literature.
