10 Doctor Who Moments You Didn't Get As A Kid (But Do As An Adult)

There's a long history of Doctor Who being inspired by horror cinema across its 61-year history. 

There are the overt references to things like Frankenstein and The Phantom of the Opera in The Brain of Morbius and The Caves of Androzani, respectively. And jumping ahead to the modern era, the unnerving hotel rooms in The God Complex are a direct lift from Stanley Kubrick's horror classic The Shining.

All of these iconic horror movies are so ingrained in our popular culture that adults watching would get the references even if their young children didn't.

Another landmark horror flick is Ridley Scott's Alien, which has a major influence on Last Christmas. It's not just the Twelfth Doctor's gag about how offensive it is to call a horror film "Alien", it's the way that the Dream Crabs are literally Facehuggers, the disturbing creatures from the Alien franchise that seek out hosts for the Xenomorphs.

The horrifying moment where the Dream Crabs fall from the ceiling draws to mind the sudden attack on John Hurt in the original movie, while the disgustingly sticky sounds as they try to remove the crabs derives the same sickening sense of horror as found in Alien.

For kids at home, these are just scary monsters, but for the adults watching, it's a callback to a horror classic that also hints everything is not as it seems inside this arctic base.