10 Most Chilling Doctor Who Moments
Spooky Doctor Who moments that stay with you long after you've emerged from behind the sofa.
Over the years, Doctor Who has gained a reputation for "teatime terror", having scared multiple generations of children over their beans on toast. The Hinchcliffe and Holmes era was notorious for this, riffing on classic horror cinema and attracting the unwanted attention of Mary Whitehouse and the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association.
However, it's one thing to horrify an audience by drowning the Doctor or tipping some baddies into an acid bath, but it's an entirely different thing to chill viewers to the bone. Explicit horror in Doctor Who is rare and can be fleeting, but truly unsettling moments are more common, and can stay with you longer.
Chilling Doctor Who moments can come in a variety of forms, from philosophical horrors to haunting imagery that you can't quite shake from your mind's eye. They're the moments that inspire a life-long compulsion to run past shop windows, or a long-standing disdain for your fellow coach passengers.
So we're not talking about Kane's face melting in Dragonfire, or Doctor Constantine's transformation into a gas mask zombie in The Empty Child. We're talking about Doctor Who moments from the past 60 years that tap into deep-seated fears and chill you to the bone.
10. Nothing At The Edge of Creation (Wild Blue Yonder)
There are some properly horrible moments in Wild Blue Yonder. Who can forget Donna melting into the floor with a cruel cackle, or the giant, mushed-up DoctorDonna blocking the corridor? It's enough to make a horse sick.
But for pure chilling existential dread, it has to be the moment where the Doctor and Donna look out of the spaceship's window to stare into the darkness at the edge of the universe. The Doctor's description of the pitch-black nothingness is chilling on a level you might not even know you have, because it emphasises the terror of the emptiness of space.
Being lost 100 trillion years from home is a terrifying thought. In that moment, it feels like there's absolutely no hope of Donna ever getting back to Earth. The scene is also unsettling because of the loneliness it evokes – not only are the Doctor and Donna all on their own, but we'd all like to think that there's other life out there in the universe. So the idea of a place where nothing exists but our darkest impulses (personified by the Not-Things) is scary to think about.
Like all the great chilling moments in film and television, the concept of the nothingness at the edge of the universe also gets more unsettling the longer you think about it.