5 More Doctor Who Monsters Which Shouldn't Have Worked (But Did)

2. The Mandragora Helix from The Masque of Mandragora (1976)

Imagine you're a BBC visual effects designer on contract and working on a tight budget, and you get yet another script from the Doctor Who production office asking you to create the impossible. This time, it's something called the Mandagora Helix, and it's described as "an intelligent astral force" able to burn human beings to ashes and take over their bodies, eventually consuming them. What's the best way to depict such a thing? Overlay a light on the main image and put some arc effects in. Yeah, that should be enough. Seriously, when you look at the way the Helix is depicted on screen, it's definitely done on the cheap, especially when the effect is overlaid on anything shot on location. The location stuff is on film this time, whereas the effects work is all done on video. Besides, look at it. It's nothing more than a ball of light with some arc effects thrown around it. That's meant to be scary? Well, yeah, when it can do this:

Yeah, that's pretty nasty. Easy and cheap to do with makeup, true - but given that modern Doctor Who almost never shows us the bodies, this would be enough to send some poor little kid screaming out of the room. Or was that just me? The Helix is no kinder to its human hosts, eventually consuming their entire bodies but somehow managing to keep their robes inflated from within to give them a human shape:

Really, this shouldn't be scary at all: it's just another light overlaid over an image of some actor's face. But the idea that there used to be a human face there, and now there's just an alien intelligence that wants to turn you into greenish-blue charcoal - that's what sells it.