Nightmare Fuel / Doctor Who – Classic Series

"I'M MELTING!"

The classic series may have had a lower budget than the revival series, but it resulted in many historical and sci-fi scares to send children behind the couch...

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Season 1

• "An Unearthly Child": Episode 2 displayed a whole human skeleton with its skull tilted to stare out at the audience, and a cave of piled human skulls. The episode (before the serials had collective names) was aptly titled "The Cave of Skulls".
• "The Daleks": This episode debuts the franchise's signature Knight of Cerebus race, what did you expect?
  • We see a lake full of horribly mutated aquatic creatures. One of them takes a very unfortunate Thal, and before that, we hear their cries. All through the night, our heroes heard them.
  • They pulled a Dalek creature out of its casing and Ian climbed in. It must be so gross in there.
  • Barbara wandering, lost, in the Dalek city in the first episode, with doors closing behind her and locking her in, can be quite scary especially if one is claustrophobic.
    • The sequence where the Daleks close in on her, with the audience looking through the eye stalk of one of them as it corners her is one of the most terrifying sequences in the show.
  • The grim implications of the setting are unflinchingly examined: stranded in a petrified wasteland inhabited by mutant predators, slowly dying of radiation sickness, and imprisoned in a sterile city by gliding, faceless creatures who seem at best indifferent to your survival. The brooding, shivering score hits the nail on the head.
• "The Edge of Destruction": The predecessor to "Midnight", with just the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara on the TARDIS and they begin to fight each other.
  • Susan threatening to stab Barbara with scissors, then forcing herself to instead stab her bed over and over while shrieking and sobbing is very freaky.
• "Marco Polo" has Tegana, a treacherous, cold-hearted Jerkass who takes more than a few measures to give hell to our heroes on their journey.
• "The Keys of Marinus":
  • The booby-trapped building. Also the Brains of Morphoton.
  • One Voord, traveling through the sea of acid, got a tear in their protective suit. Slow and painful death ensued.
  • Barbara gets trapped in an icy mountain, at the mercy of a deranged hermit. Who is the former Trope Namer for a form of murder?
• "The Aztecs" takes human sacrifice and rolls with it, with Barbara's realization that she can't possibly hope to change that aspect of history.
• "The Sensorites" is worry-inducing enough with the City Administrator's scheming against the heroes, but then come the monsters in the sewer...
  • Though they turned out to be more or less amicable, the build-up to the Sensorites' appearance in the first episode is nightmare fuel incarnate. First, Maitland and Carol tell of how the Sensorites trapped them in orbit of the Sense Sphere, using their mind control to put them in a deep sleep and driving their crewmate John to insanity. Then the Sensorites steal the lock of the TARDIS, trapping all of them on the ship, and briefly send the ship careening toward the planet. And when things finally seem calm, the Sensorites fully reveal themselves when one of them simply glides up to the front window of the ship and simply stares inside. That's right, they can exist in the vacuum of space unharmed and can enter the ship anytime they want to.

Season 2

• "Planet of Giants": Barbara accidentally comes in contact with some nuts laced with incredibly dangerous pesticide, and becomes nearly as sick as that time everyone got radiation poisoning in "The Daleks", on the verge of collapsing. Just then, the last we see of the villain involves him getting a spray of said pesticide right in the eyes.
• "The Dalek Invasion of Earth":
  • The early series' sense of hopelessness and despair in its purest form, as Daleks have taken over Earth entirely. Before the Doctor shows up, there is no one around fit enough to stand up to them, let alone defeat them. Couple that with them choosing the fittest among the survivors and turning them into robotic slaves, and you got yourself a solid 3 hours of nightmare fuel. This story (not counting "The Daleks") was by far the show's darkest moment, and its ticket into a lifetime of full-fledged Nightmare Fuel.
  • The Slyther may not be the best SPFX out there, but imagine a prison camp not only run by Daleks but guarded by what is almost certainly another Davros special.
• "The Rescue": Vicki is a teenage girl virtually alone on a planet, save for her crippled crewmate who turns out to be a psychopath who killed the rest of his crew and committed genocide just so he could save himself from the Earth authorities by blaming it on a monster, who is also himself in disguise.
• "The Romans" functions as a light humor piece for the most part, but towards the end, the Doctor realizes that he just may have caused the Great Fire of Rome... and laughs eerily.
• "The Web Planet": Six episodes of tension and fear as the psychically superpowered Animus (revealed in the Expanded Universe to be a creature from the Lovecraft mythos) constantly sends the usually peaceful Zarbi to massacre the rest of the natives, and becomes obsessed with the Doctor once he arrives.
  • Especially when the Doctor and Vicki get cocooned in cobwebs and it looks like they are suffocating.
• "The Space Museum": Imagine finding yourself in a silent shadow of the world a few minutes into the future, where you leave no footprints, walk about unseen and unheard, like a ghost. Then you see your own stuffed and mounted corpses on display.
• "The Chase" has monsters that knock down walls in the fish-people city, and the way that one monster jumps on the poor alien that Barbara tries in vain to save...
  • The chapter where the Daleks land on the sailing ship, and the crew and passengers throw themselves into the ocean in sheer terror. And then you learn that the name of the ship is the Mary Celeste...
  • "Next episode - THE DEATH OF DOCTOR WHO."
• "The Time Meddler": Imagine a full-scale invasion of organized Pirates, hundreds of ships. That's what the historical Viking invasion of 1066 was.

Season 3

• "Mission to the Unknown": The varga plants. They are The Virus, and when you turn into one, you have this overwhelming urge to kill.
• "The Daleks' Master Plan":
  • It begins with a politician, an admired and respected public figure, revealed to be allying himself with the Daleks and selling out the whole of humanity for his benefit.
  • They go on to explain how the Daleks are "allying" themselves with delegates from all over the universe to overthrow the solar system by building a doomsday weapon.
  • The Doctor manages to steal a vital component of this weapon, but in his escape, he and the crew are forced to stop on the planet Desperus, a prison planet, where they just dump the convicts on the surface and leave them to fend for themselves.
  • When Bret Vyon (played by Nicholas Courtney) tries to get help from his sister Sara Kingdom, a guard from the Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, she kills him and plots to do the same to the others.
  • The lot is accidentally teleported to a planet plagued with invisible monsters, which only the Daleks can keep at bay.
  • Later, they land on a volcanic planet, meeting an old enemy who locks them out of the TARDIS as the magma builds up around them.
  • Nearing its conclusion, the Doctor is forced to give up the device's core through an intricate plot involving Egyptians, and he has barely enough time to chase the Daleks before they activate it...
  • ...and when they do, it goes out of control, taking the planet Kembel (hosting the most hostile of jungles in the universe) and reducing it to a dry, eroded ball of nothing, as the corpses of every living creature on it are strewn across its surface. The last few minutes are just the Doctor and Steven contemplating all the destruction.
    The Doctor: What a waste. What a terrible waste.
  • Victims of the Daleks' activation of their Time Destructor include themselves (hyper-evolved into as the novelization puts it "starfish creatures") and the Doctor and one of his companions. He survives although is weakened by the millions of years that washed over him, she is less fortunate. And the audience gets to watch as she screams and ages to dust.
• "The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve": A minute and a half of etchings to the sound of shouting and drums bring home the horror of one of the most terrible events in French history more effectively than any sort of live action could.
• "The Celestial Toymaker", a Psychopathic Man Child (played by Michael Gough) who will turn you into one of his playthings if you lose his games and destroy the world if you win (and you with it unless you can make a fast enough exit).
  • The games themselves? The Blind Man's Buff game wasn't so bad, compared to the booby-trapped chairs, the dance that entraps, and the electrified floor on the hopscotch field.
• "The War Machines", where brainwashed workers build said Machines until they collapse. Something of a Fridge Logic moment as an AI would surely realize that human beings need regular food and rest to work efficiently.

Season 4

• "The Smugglers": There's a surviving clip in part 3 where Captain Pike has just given one of his goons the You Have Failed Me treatment, and then the camera follows a bloodstained handkerchief to the pirate's corpse. Then, the dead man's eyes are staring right at you.
• "The Tenth Planet": The original Cybermen make their first appearance and prove to be extremely unnerving. Not to mention they looked like futuristic versions of Frankenstein's monster and also spoke in a creepy singsong voice:
  Cyberleader: [after learning of the men trapped in the space probe] It is not important. There's really no point, they could never reach us now.
  Polly: But don't you care?
  Cyberleader: Care? No, why should I care?
  Polly: Because they're people and they're going to die!
  Cyberleader: I do not understand you, there are people dying all over your world yet you do not care about them?
  
  Cyberleader: [after the general contacts the emergency line] That was really most unfortunate, you should not have done that.
  
  Cyberleader: The energy of Mondas is nearly exhausted and now returns to its twin and will gather energy from Earth.
  The Doctor: Energy!?
  Barclay: For how long?
  Cyberleader: Until it is all gone.
  Dyson: But that means the Earth will die!
  Cyberleader: Yes, everything on Earth will stop.
  Barclay: But you can't just stand there and tell us we're all going to die!
  Cyberleader: You are not going to die.
  The Doctor: Then how are you going to stop this drain of energy to Mondas?
  Cyberleader: We cannot, it is beyond our power.
  The Doctor: How are we going to survive!?
  Cyberleader: By coming with us.
• "The Power of the Daleks":
  • A scientist restores an inert Dalek and shows it off to the other members of his space colony. The Doctor also happens to be present, and while he tries to warn them of the misery and destruction that the creature may bring, the Dalek overlaps by yelling "I am your ser-vant! I am your ser-vant!" over the Doctor's increasingly desperate cries. They keep chanting "I am your ser-vant" throughout the serial, to very creepy effect. When Daleks are on the warpath, they're scary. When they're trying to be servile, they're downright unsettling.
  • Later in the serial, the scientist catches wind of the Daleks' true nature, which leaves him in such shock that he cannot speak without his voice trembling, and by the end he's gone completely insane, believing that the Daleks have come to replace man as the dominant species. The eyes are also scary.
    Ben: You've done all this. Why did you give them power in the first place?
    Lesterson: Well, I could control it, you see. And then Janley got one of her men - Valmar, I think it was, yes - and he rigged up a secret cable. It's carrying power directly from the colony's supply.
    The Doctor: Where? Where is it, Lesterson?
    Lesterson: Valmar's the only one who can answer that. Or the Daleks of course. They know everything. Yes, you should ask the Daleks.
  • His final moment of madness:
    Lesterson: I want to help... you.
    Dalek: Why?
    Lesterson: I... am your ser-vant.
  • At the beginning of that same story, after the Doctor's regenerated for the first time, he huddles around in disorientation, eventually pulling out a chest with some old belongings, including his recorder, a 500-year-old diary, and a piece of metal which makes him remember a single word: Extermination.
  • The surviving clip of the newly-regenerated Doctor chuckling as he says "It's over" is downright sinister.
  • From an outsider's perspective (which is exactly what Ben and Polly both have at the time), regeneration itself is downright terrifying. Someone you know very well has collapsed, after seeming to be ill for quite some time, only to be bathed in light and to emerge from it as someone who looks and acts completely different, but insists they're the same person you knew. Are they the same person? If so, why do they act so differently now? Can you trust them? How often does this happen? Will you ever see your old friend again...?
• "The Underwater Menace": The Fish People were born humans, but went through a mind-numbing operation (which is almost forced onto Polly) which enabled them to survive underwater. Also, Zaroff's watery doom.
• "The Macra Terror":
  • The Macra in their original story are sentient and cunning. The clips on Lost in Time are terrifying, especially when the "Controller" is pleading in vain for mercy and is very obviously not in control. These things eventually devolve, thankfully.
  • "No one in the colony believes in Macra! There's no such thing as Macra! Macra do not exist! There are no Macra!!!"
  • In the animated adaptation, the Macra jaws look like Shelob's!
• "The Faceless Ones":
  • That tour company. Tourists board but never disembark (unless the Doctor shows up before they start dying, which he does).
  • The Chameleons' modus operandi, not fully explained until Jamie reaches their hideout in space: when they board the planes, the victims are slowly subjected to a process of spatial compression, and by the time they've reached the hideout, they're the size of dolls, and are unconsciously kept in drawers until the Chameleons have further use for them. Also, if their disguise-generating armbands are prematurely removed, they dissolve into lifeless blobs.
  • The And I Must Scream horror of the victims paralyzed in their little boxes, staring, only able to scream mentally. Terrifying when this happens to Polly.
  • On a Fridge Horror note, what must have happened on the Chameleons' home planet that forced them to steal other creatures' faces and identities to survive?
    • This somewhat becomes Narm if you watch what's left, read the scripts, and learn that the reason is insultingly vague: They lost their identities in a gigantic explosion.
• "The Evil of the Daleks": Maxtible gets infected with the Dalek factor. Even with only the audio and Tom Baker's narration on the Missing Stories cassette or poor-quality reconstructions to go from, it's still clearly a Fate Worse than Death.

Season 5

• "The Tomb of the Cybermen":
  • "... you belong to uzzzzz... you shall be like uzzzzz"
  • The scene where they all start waking up and climbing out of their hive-like tomb. The music that plays during that scene is bone-chilling as well. ^note Which is quite a feat, considering it was just stock music at the BBC. Listen here.
  • As if the Cybermen weren't disturbing enough, when they speak, if you listen closely you can hear a second voice underneath the louder Machine Monotone, a barely-audible breathy, whisper, the actual voice of the Cyberman speaking.
  • By the time The Tomb of the Cybermen comes around, we've seen enough of the implacable cyborgs to be immediately scared by them, but this story also introduces the cybermats, small, creeping cyber-mooks designed to look vaguely like silverfish, but with a pair of bug-eyes (complete with pupils) which seem to pulsate during the extreme close-ups given in the scene where they crawl over some of the sleeping main cast.
  • The Cybermats are very clearly stated in Expanded Universe materials to be made from miniaturized Cyberman tech and organs of creatures too small to be effectively cyberconverted. Including children.
  • Earlier on in the story, the Doctor, Jamie, Victoria, and the expedition team all split up into small groups and explore various rooms in the city of Telos. Jamie goes into one of the said rooms with a man named Haydon and they begin messing with a control panel, which activates a mechanism used for weapon testing that hypnotizes potential test subjects. Jamie falls under its control very quickly and what results is something that brings to mind the image of a moth being attracted to a bug-zapper.
    Jamie: I can't seem to take my eyes off it... I don't want to take my eyes off it... I don't want to take my eyes off it! Yes! Yes, I see it now!
  • After Haydon turns off the hypnotism mechanism, they begin messing with it again, resulting in Haydon being shot and killed by the weapon that was being tested.
• "The Abominable Snowmen":
  Padmasambhava: Oh, Intelligence. You promised to release me, yet still I feel your grasp upon this frail body. Why? What is happening? This was not your plan. But if you continue to expand...
  [he realises what the Intelligence's plan really is]
  Padmasambhava: I have brought the world to its end.
• "The Enemy of the World":
  • The serial progresses with a plot which wouldn't be out of place in an action movie (almost Bond-like) right up until the very end, the only time when the Doctor and Salamander meet, engaging in a duel inside the TARDIS which causes them to accidentally flip the dematerialization switch. The only problem is the doors weren't closed, and Salamander is flung out by the turbulence into the vortex, screaming, left — possibly — to die an unimaginable death. To make matters worse, the next story has the Doctor speculating on how Salamander is now floating in the Vortex for all eternity, raising the possibility that he remains alive and aware of his fate. That's how it ends. Thankfully, the next story picks up at this very moment.
  • The disturbing moment when Fedorin chokes and dies.
• "The Web of Fear":
  • The robot Yeti, especially the death of that curator.
  • Due to the disbelief of a pompous collector and the fact that the only man who knows how to fight them has grown old and is now mocked, the Yeti make a nightmarish takeover of London, covering the entire city in a web which is also the physical manifestation of the being that controls them, which spreads so far that the first look the Doctor and co. have of the city includes a man who was ensnared alive, and the only way people have found to survive is to retreat into the underground, where the Yeti and said web is steadily closing in on them, leaving them with nowhere else to go. When Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart tries to lead a team of soldiers to a safer area on the surface, they run into a few Yeti, who kill everyone except himself... BUT that's not all. There's a traitor among the small group of survivors who turns out to be dead from the start, his corpse animated by the same abomination that masterminded the whole thing. The lost trailer is a testament to any remaining doubt anyone may have had about "behind the couch".
• "Fury from the Deep":
  • Oak and Quill's attack on Maggie, van Lutyens being captured by the weed creature, and Robson attacking the guard. And that's just in the surviving footage.
  • Imagine being stuck in an enclosed complex, miles away from civilization, with the man in charge being prepotent and irresponsible, as well as being occasionally harassed by a couple of creepy men who seem to do everything in synch. You try to distract yourself, so you go lie down- what's that pounding noise? Is that foam coming closer to the windows? And where'd that piece of seaweed come from? What's going on? Why are the two of you here? W-what's he- HOLY FUCK, WHAT ARE THOSE TENTACLES, WHERE'S ALL THE FOAM COMING FROM, WHAAAAARGH...
• "The Wheel in Space" is a rather slow serial, plot-wise, serving more than anything as an introduction for Zoe (The Cybermen, stellar villains, aren't even in it that much, and the Doctor doesn't even meet them until halfway through the final episode). So it can come as quite a surprise to see a cold, calculating Cyberman violently writhing in pain as he's fried to death by a force field.

Season 6

• "The Dominators" has the (extremely painful) intelligence tests. Some may consider the Quarks' destructive power to be this as well.
• "The Mind Robber":
  • There is a scene where Jamie and Zoe are trapped between the pages of a closing book — and are turned into fiction. And that's a Cliffhanger, so we get to see it twice.
  • Those bizarre sound effects in episode 1.
    • When Jamie and Zoe are lured into the void by a mysterious intelligence, the imagery starts to get incredibly surreal. Then there's that ending... After an onslaught of deafening noise as the Doctor struggles to keep hold of sanity, the TARDIS explodes. Jamie and Zoe cling to the console as it spins in a black sea of nothingness. Zoe spots the Doctor floating, unconscious, some way off, and screams like there's no tomorrow. The rest of the serial is tame in comparison.
    • The moment the TARDIS materializes in the white void, he is terrified, but he doesn't even know why. He just knows they aren't safe, and delivers every line in a terse whisper, determined to find a way out as soon as possible. It gives the whole first episode a palpable air of dread and menace, which only increases when the surreal visuals start appearing.
    • When Zoe whimpers "The Doctor!" and then suddenly starts to scream, followed by a close-up of the Doctor's face, one would feel certain he's about to turn into a monster of some kind.
  • Jamie ''losing his face.''
  • Zoe and the Doctor coming face to face with Medusa.
• "The Invasion":
  • Cybermen rising from the sewers of London, beginning their invasion from within the capital. And if that wasn't enough, they came with horrifying sounds. Even to this day, nobody knows how or why exactly Cybermen are producing such noise, which makes it even more scarier.
  • Professor Watkins tells Vaughn he'll kill him when he gets the chance, so Vaughn challenges him by giving him a gun. After a moment of doubt, Watkins does shoot him — Vaughn takes the bullet with no problem. His body's made of metal!
  • One of the Cybermen was used as a test subject for an emotion-exaggerating machine, frightening it out of its mind, as it screamed inside its helmet and killed anything in front of it.
  • When Vaughn is forsaken by the Cybermen, he goes mad, destroys the communications device, then calls for his minion — and a Cyberman steps into frame.
• "The Krotons":
  • The primitive humanoid Gonds are tested for samples of high intelligence, and the rejects are vaporized. No Gond has been accepted during the tests, which have been going on for a good thousand years.
  • The Krotons plan to kill everyone on the planet when they leave.
• "The Seeds of Death":
  • The seed pods multiply as fungus which then swells up and bursts into fumes that suck out all the oxygen in your lungs, killing you instantly. The remnants of the smoke travel invisibly to rapidly breed into more fungus.
  • An Ice Warrior transports himself to Earth and spends several scenes just eerily striding through the countryside, across the foam, killing anyone foolish enough to stand in his way.
• "The War Games":
  • The nightmarish abductions make up for some pretty strong Nightmare Fuel. Then come the Time Lords, and decide that the only fitting punishment for the perpetrators is ''being erased from time, space, history, and all of existence''.
  • The Second Doctor's forced regeneration sequence isn't a pretty sight. First multiple images of himself surround him and start spinning around him, then his face is obscured in darkness as he starts spiraling down into the black abyss repeatedly shouting "No!" It doesn't help that after the rules of regeneration were established later on, this particular regeneration is basically the Second Doctor being executed by the Time Lords. Seeing the clownish, playful, fun-loving, childish version of the Doctor meet such a bleak end is just chilling.

Season 7

• "Spearhead from Space":
  • The Autons first appeared here, and have come back numerous times since they're animated mannequins who want to kill you. Their faces alone are also creepy.
  • The buildup to them: After hinting strongly that the alien consciousness controls plastic, they shove a doll factory montage in your face, predating Moffat's "inescapable horror shots" by decades.
  • Everything about Channing. Bilis Manger took inexpressive-face lessons from this guy.
    • Ugh. Channing. The eyes. The lack of emotions.
• "Doctor Who and the Silurians": The Silurian Virus, and how it spreads rapidly to kill people in the hundreds in a matter of hours.
• "The Ambassadors of Death":
  • "I don't know what we brought down in Recovery 7... but it certainly wasn't human!"
  • When the astronaut in the rescue capsule goes into the stranded rocket, he looks up and screams, but you don't hear him scream. You see him scream. And it's terrifying.
• "Inferno":
  • The end of episode 6. Yeah, it's an evil Mirror Universe, but the world ends and everybody dies. The last shot of the episode is of the only remotely sympathetic secondary characters watching a river of magma crawl toward them, knowing there's nothing they can do to save themselves.
  • The horror of the ending didn't set in until you started thinking about what must have been happening further away from the penetration site. All over the world, innocent people were falling into fissures, burning alive, being beaten to death by crazed proto-human zombies, or turning into said zombies and 99.9% of them would never even know why.
  • There's a terrifying shot in that final montage that brings the above horror home: while seeing lava spewing everywhere, and people running all over the place, we see two men, sitting dazed in the middle of the lava mists, as the world goes up around them. Just sitting. While the world dies around them. There's something so moving and yet so horrific about that single moment.
  • The Expanded Universe implies the alternate reality Earth is being ruled with an iron first... by an evil version of the Doctor. His second incarnation chose one of the faces he was offered before his exile began and took over the world, becoming just like Ramon Salamander.
  • Earlier on in the serial, the alternate universe version of Benton is caught by a pack of monsters and forcibly turned into one of them. The whole scene is eerily similar to the Transformation Sequence from An American Werewolf in London (even though it technically predates that film).

Season 8

• "Terror of the Autons" features:
  • A man getting suffocated by an inflatable couch.
  • Another getting his neck bitten by an evil-looking doll.
  • Jo Grant almost getting suffocated by a plastic film sprayed over her mouth by a plastic daffodil.
  • That's before we even get into killer British bobbies.
  • This story did a chilling job of showing just how many different flavors the Autons can come in.
• "The Mind of Evil" features a machine that literally brings your worst fear to life to kill you. And it grows in strength so much, even the Master has trouble resisting it. Of course, this is because those with more evil are more vulnerable to it, but still...
  • Worse, the machine gets stronger each time it drains evil out of someone. And it causes the victims drained of evil thoughts to regress to childlike mentality. Why? There is an Eldritch Abomination living inside the machine, and after it grows strong enough, it quits projecting fears and starts outright killing everyone through Mind Rape.
• "The Claws of Axos": Axos. Axos, Axons and Axonite are a single parasite that eats all living matter off a world, after persuading someone desiring to be seen as a public benefactor to disburse the axonite.
  • Some of the Axons are quite creepy even in their humanoid form, especially the Episode 2 scene where the Axon Woman melts into her true form, only partially obscured by a green strobe.
• "The Dæmons" was, basically, Doctor Who doing Hammer Horror, with the Master practicing what seemed like devil-worship. The occult elements have made it a firm fan favourite.
  • The opening scene, where on a dark and stormy night, a man stumbles out of a pub to see a dark figure, only to die of fear from seeing it.
  • Any scene with Azal.
  • Even just the disturbing and uneasy atmosphere is creepy.
  • The Gargoyle. How he was capable of vaporizing people... -shudder-

Season 9

• "Day of the Daleks": The Alternate timeline in which Earth is ruled by the Daleks.
• "The Sea Devils": The Sea Devils emerging from the ocean.
• "The Mutants": Take your pick. The psycho Marshal, the mutation gone wrong, the Fridge Horror of the locals, who have the same failings we do, turning into Gary Mitchells...
• "The Time Monster: The Master's description of the fate suffered by Kronos' victims, who he says are fated to float around in the time vortex for all eternity, never being allowed to age or die. The Doctor is saved from this fate courtesy of the TARDIS, but Percival, who got devoured by Kronos during its first on-screen appearance, isn't so lucky.

Season 10

• "The Three Doctors" has a man's face entrapped in cosmic lightning, a bizarre antimatter alien that is initially believed to destroy anyone it touches, giant walking blobs that can shoot lasers and are immune to bullets and rockets, and Omega has had his entire body eroded away by exposure to his antimatter world and exists now as nothing more than his essence full of rage and hatred. Seriously, when he takes of his helmet...
• "Carnival of Monsters":
  • Drashigs, relentless predators that cannot be diverted from a scent. Because they have no brains!
  • The miniscope itself is a fairly unnerving concept. Sentient beings are kept in tanks to be observed for amusement, trapped in a permanent memory-erasing loop and artificially angered to create a spectacle... it kind of makes you re-think looking at animals at the zoo or keeping fish in a tank.
• "Planet of the Daleks":
  • A fungus that can sense when an endotherm is passing and fire spore slurry at them. If not treated, the fungus engulfs and chokes you. Then, there's the whole Fridge Logic of what would have happened to the universe if the Daleks had succeeded in mastering invisibility.
  • Some of the locations on Spiridon are quite creepy, such as the Plain of Stones with it's weird jungle-like sound effects and howling, swooping creatures. On the note of the swooping creatures, no-one knows anything about them or their true origin.
  • This is one of few stories in which the Daleks themselves show genuine, desperate primal fear. When Wester unleashes the Daleks' bacteriological weapon onto their scientists, sealed in a testing room, they yell "WE CANNOT LEAVE HERE. NO ONE CAN ENTER. WE CAN NEVER LEAVE. NEVER. NEVER." and remain locked in there as their base is destroyed, flooded by an icy volcano which proves lethal on contact to Daleks.
• "The Green Death":
  • The Doctor being nearly annihilated by the hostile wildlife of Wales. Keep in mind that Wales is not a planet.
  • Miners dying from an incredibly painful infection which makes their skin glow green.
  • Mutant maggots which are able to jump and seek to spread said infection, and the Doctor and Jo being forced to paddle their way through a pool of these creatures...
  • The BOSS, whose cheerfulness can be very unsettling (he sings when he's minutes away from unleashing his world-domination plan) especially when considering he's an insane computer.

Season 11

• "The Time Warrior": A Sontaran's biggest weakness is the probic vent in the back of their neck? The last we see of Linx is Hal shooting an arrow straight into the vent.
• "Invasion of the Dinosaurs": A gruesome shot of a burglar bloodied up after being crushed to death by a giant dinosaur. Sarah Jane looks away upon seeing his mangled body, and the Doctor just gives him a pitiful look ironed out with regret. He might have been an Asshole Victim, but he seemed more like someone with hard luck than a straight aces killer.
• "Death to the Daleks":
  • If the Exxilons' operatic chanting and frightening Monk outfits aren't scary enough, just wait until you see their eyes.
  • The bit in part one where Sarah is attacked by an Exxilon in the TARDIS.
  • Bellal's first scenes where he's stalking the Doctor and Sarah through the tunnels in part two can come off as intimidating to some. Thankfully, he turns out to be a good guy.
  • The trippy scene in which the city messes with Bellal's mind and the Doctor's hair can be scene as frighteningly bizarre due to the spinning six lights and alien noises.
  • The final ending with the city dying, you can audibly hear voices screaming to symbolise this.
• "Planet of the Spiders". "Round and round the mulberry bush..."
  • How about the fact that it's a planet ruled by MOTHERFUCKING GIANT SPIDERS. Forget Kill It with Fire, this calls for massive firepower.
  • It went From Bad to Worse in the Expanded Universe. The last trip back to Earth takes the Doctor TEN YEARS. Ten years of slowly dying from radiation poisoning. Gah.

Season 12

• "The Ark in Space": When Sarah Jane's nightmares do not involve Daleks, she is likely reliving the incident with the Wirrn. Giant insects that turn you into them.
  • Probably the worst bit of that episode is when the Doctor encounters Noah in the final form of his transformation, with part of his mouth twisted into a hideous grimace, and bits of his face covered in green Wirrn skin...
    • It looks like he's grimmacing in agony.
  • Another horrifying part is when the Doctor realizes that he must hook up the dead Wirrn's mind to his own brain in order to find out what killed it so that they can find its weakness. It's made very clear that the process could easily kill him, or cause him to remain a part of the Wirrn's mind forever. The Doctor himself even seems scared, as he's clearly only doing it because It's the Only Way to find a way to save the ship. He even gives Vira a gun and tells her not to hesitate to use it if something goes wrong. When the machine is activated, the Doctor barely keeps himself from screaming several times, before he seems to loose consciousness during a process that looks a lot like Mind Rape. As soon as the process is completed, Sarah Jane quickly disconnects the Doctor from the machine, however, Vira is more wary and holds Sarah Jane back as the Doctor comes to consciousness. He's completely glassy eyed, doesn't seem to be aware of the two of them, and is in some sort of trance as he slowly repeats, "Wirrn. Wirrin. Wirrin!" in a mindless voice. Vira and Sarah Jane are absolutely terrified, and Vira even takes aim at the Doctor before Sarah Jane grabs the gun out of her hand. Thankfully, he's fine a minute later, but the overall effect is still very unnerving and is probably one of the most psychologically terrifying moments of the entire series.
  • There was a Deleted Scene where Noah, while describing his Painful Transformation to Vira, would beg her to kill him. This was scrapped for being too horrifying. It says a lot that the Philip Hinchcliffe era, which prided itself on being Darker and Edgier, that this was the only time material was cut for being too scary.
• "The Sontaran Experiment": The eponymous procedure, especially the outstanding part that fits this trope the most.
  Styre: Project: resistance to fear.
  • And continuity-based Fridge Horror: She's absolutely terrified and the hallucinations haven't even gotten as far as that crukking clown yet!
• "Genesis of the Daleks" is filled with nightmare fuel, even before we get to the pepperpots. We start off with Skaro, a barren nuclear wasteland, lacking any colour, with two city-states constantly fighting one another, and they've been at it for so long their technology is sliding backwards. And the Thal and Kaled militaries are running so low on soldiers, they're recruiting incredibly young. One of the first soldiers we meet doesn't look like he'd be old enough to drive.
  • Davros. Just... Davros. When the Ninth Doctor called him 'king of his own little world' he wasn't kidding. It's not just the Daleks, the way he goes from that harsh almost-buzz to manic screaming, or the megalomania, it's everything. But the most chilling is the virus speech. And then there's that tiny 'yes'.
    Davros: To hold in my hand a capsule that contains such power, to know that life and death on such a scale was my choice, to know that the tiny pressure of my thumb, enough to break the glass would end everything..Yes... I would do it. That power would set me up above the gods! AND THROUGH THE DALEKS, I! SHALL! HAVE! THAT! POWER!
  • The cliffhanger of the first episode. Sarah-Jane's gotten separated from the Doctor and Harry, and is walking on her own in this dark, irradiated wasteland, until she suddenly sees something. It's a Dalek, the first Dalek. And it's ready to kill.
  • The fact that neither side is much to write home about. The Daleks may be evil, but by the time they show up, there's not much that could really be done to make Skaro worse.
  • The scenes in the Thal dome once the Daleks get there. Imagine, you've finally won a war that's been going on for generations, you're celebrating, when these odd things just appear from nowhere. And just as you're staring at them, that odd egg-whisk thing moves and 'EXTERMINATE'. And we never hear of a single Dalek being destroyed by the Thals, either...
  • Remember Davros' experiments in "The Daleks"? We see more of them, land-based. One of them nearly eats Harry.
  • Davros' blood-curdling scream as he's exterminated.
• "Revenge of the Cybermen": Anyone who is unfortunate enough to be bitten by a Cybermat gets glowing red veins.

Season 13

• "Terror of the Zygons": Philip Hinchcliffe's era is at its finest with this one. The very first full introduction of a gothic-looking Zygon in the cliffhanger for part one is handled suddenly, making the reveal extremely unnerving. Not helped by the fact Sarah starts screaming bloody murder at the sight of it. There's a good reason why this serial is called Terror of the Zygons- their appearance more than lives up to the title.
  • Harry's Zygon duplicate trying to murder Sarah with a pitchfork.
• "Planet of Evil" gave us a Monster that only appears in the form of a red outline, is never heard to speak (except for a very surreal scene where it communicates with the Doctor in the black void), devours people and later regurgitates their dessicated bodies and contaminates a member of the expedition, turning him into an homicidal ape-man that can duplicate itself. Bloody terrifying still to this day.
  • Slight error: The creature that appeared only in outline was actually trying to prevent contamination of the crew members, as well as keep them from causing an apocalypse on their homeworld by taking matter from the planet with them. Killing them was preferable to allowing them to contaminate themselves with the strange material or take it away.
• "Pyramids of Mars": Sutekh. Holy Egyptian mythology, Sutekh.
  • To elaborate, he's a Physical God and Omnicidal Maniac who almost wiped out his own race (except a handful of the other Osirians), can control a corpse and army of service robots from Mars, and Mind Rape the Doctor into complete submission... and he's capable of doing this while being trapped in a pyramid, unable to move for the past 7000 years. Is it any wonder that his actor later voiced the freaking Devil?! Even the Time Lords themselves can't defeat him, and this is coming from an alien race who later waged centuries of warfare against the Daleks! Oh, and you know that it's bad when the Doctor himself is terrified of him.
    • It took the work of seven hundred and fifty gods to deal with Sutekh, and the best they could do was imprison him.
    • Other than that, the Egyptian "servant" gets his organs fried just because Sutekh's "servant", in a ominous black helmet and robe, was mistaken for Sutekh himself.
      Sutekh's Servant: [as Ibraham Namin screams in agony while smoke rises off his shoulders] I bring Sutekh's gift of death to all human life...
  • And then it gets even worse when it's revealed that the "servant" is Marcus Scarman. Yes, an innocent Egyptologist turned into a remorseless, ruthless, killing machine. His stare does not help, and likely gave lots of children nightmares at the time.
    • Then Sutekh makes Marcus murder his own brother. Brrrrr.
    • Some Fridge Horror here — if Sutekh escaped, he couldn't just wipe out all humans, he would wipe out every single existing thing in the universe-stars, planets, etc. He could annihilate the Daleks, crush the Ice Warriors, destroy the Sontarans, wipe out the Cybermen, burn the Autons, murder the Master, make the Silurians extinct and even take on the Great Intelligence (and very likely win.) And if he ever possessed the Doctor completely and made him his slave, he could make companions or the Doctor himself no longer exist! Worst of all, he would not stop until the universe was completely empty.
    • The scene where Scarman's head suddenly turns into some weird jackal head◊ while screaming "DESTROY!" in an inhuman voice is pretty creepy.
• "The Android Invasion" features evil duplicates of both Sarah Jane and the Doctor, the only thing in the universe that can make Tom Baker's smile even creepier. The way Android!Doctor helps Android!Sarah Jane up would be touching, until you remember.
  • Android!Doctor in general. When talking to the real Sarah Jane, he has a perpetually blank facial expression when not doing a Cheshire Cat Grin and is just far too good at hand-to-hand combat compared to the real Doctor.
• "The Brain of Morbius" sounds rather tame — a Mad Scientist tries to resurrect a Time Lord war criminal by building a new body. But it's only when you actually watch the serial that the Nightmare Fuel kicks in:
  • Morbius' brain is kept in a glass tank in Solon's lab. Not being happy about this, the brain shrieks at him at how he can't feel or see, basically floating in a cold, dark blackness. What makes it worse is that he's only able to talk via an apparatus that makes him sound suspiciously like Davros.
  • The Morbius body is made up of victims that crashed onto the planet. The result is a hulking thing with a huge claw for an arm and stitches all over his body. It doesn't help that the plastic case in lieu of a head is hilariously small compared to his body.
  • When Morbius first awakens, his brain is only functioning at a primitive level. The result is frightening - the creature snarls like an animal, screams when his claw catches fire and attacks everything in sight. He then sees his new body for the first time — and goes nuts, smashing his way out of the lab to kill things.
  • Oh, and just to round off the Morbius nightmare fuel spectrum, he's not too happy with his head (as mentioned, it's basically a transparent glass bowl — would you be?) and wants another one. Ideally, the Doctor's. But he's probably be just as happy with yours...
  • Don't forget the really graphic close-up of Condo getting shot by Solon, bloody squib and all. No wonder Mary Whitehouse had it in for this show.
• "The Seeds of Doom":
  • The Krynoid. The seed pod hooks into an animal life form — including Human — and takes it over. When it matures (in a matter of days), it expels a thousand seeds to repeat the cycle. Oh, and it can turn all the vegetation to its cause, as well as some people.
  • Mr. Chase's mulching machine is possibly the scariest moment in the story when he puts Sergeant Henderson in it. He doesn't come out. Not long after that Chase himself follows him... awake and screaming.

Season 14

• "The Masque of Mandragora": There's a sequence where two villainous characters are discussing their plans to kill off the heir to the throne, while said heir's best friend is screaming in agony just off-screen. And you never know what they did to him, you just see the results later...
  • To clarify — said best friend is being tortured, nastily, by a bloke who, according to the novelisation of said story, loves red-hot pokers a tad too much.
• "The Hand of Fear": The cliffhanger to the first episode, where the eponymous hand starts reconstituting itself and moves.
• "The Deadly Assassin": This serial is a real nightmare fuel pile-up.
  • Having your foot stuck in the rails when a steam train comes at you at full tilt? Check.
  • Being drowned (a scene so horrible it was censored for years)? Check.
  • Evil dentists with huge, fuck-off needles? Check.
  • Random samurai kicking you off a cliff? Check.
  • Gas mask soldiers? Check.
  • Goddamn evil clowns? Check.
  • Random snipers? Check.
  • Trapped in a nightmare (one engineered by your worst enemy, no less)? Check.
  • The emaciated Master is worse. The 20th Anniversary volume Doctor Who: A Celebration features a full-page, black-and-white photo that makes him look more horribly burned than emaciated.
• The Face of Evil:
  • The cliffhanger of Part three where the Fourth Doctor tries to tell Xoanon that he is a seperate entity but voiced by three different people, Xoanon is having absolutely none of it and shouts the 4th Doctor into submission. Then with Tom Baker's Nightmare Face on the big screen, Xoanon shouts in a childish voice, "Who am I? Who am I!? Who am I!?".
• "The Robots of Death":
  • An Agatha Christie-ish mystery with a small, rapidly diminishing number of people at the mercy of a madman who reprograms their servant robots to do murderous deeds. Said robots have designs straight out of the Uncanny Valley, with extremely detailed but completely immobile faces- one of the crew, especially sensitive to human body language, goes mad from "robophobia", a fear related to the robots' lack of body language that makes him feel he is surrounded by the walking dead.
  • And then we see the villain reprogramming one of the robots. It's Strapped to an Operating Table, its face removed, there's a probe entering its brain, and its hands are spasming as if it's in horrific agony...
• "The Talons of Weng-Chiang": a hideously decaying war criminal from the future sucking the life force from local women, giant rats stalking the sewers and feeding on the corpses, the living satanic doll with the cerebral cortex of a pig as its wetware...A Grade Nightmare Fuel.

Season 15

• "Horror of Fang Rock":
  • The creepy, fog-drenched atmosphere. The high death toll. The growing paranoia of being besieged in a small building with no contact to the outside world. But then there was a shot of the shapeshifting Rutan just standing there on the stairs, unseen in the shadows, expressionless.
  • The periodic sounding of the foghorn only adds to the creepy atmosphere.
  • The cliffhanger to part 3 deserves a mention:
    The Doctor: Oh Leela, I've made a terrible mistake. I thought I'd locked the enemy out. Instead, I've locked it in, with us.
• "The Invisible Enemy" is, for the most part, delightful nonsense. But the idea of an intelligent virus...
• "Image of the Fendahl":
  • The Fendahl are giant slug-like creatures that paralyse you and eat you alive. An ancient horror that reaches out through time and takes over your mind, transforming people around you into said monsters as vessels for its rebirth. Some of this would make Steven Moffat back away shuddering.
  • Not to mention that twelve Fendahleen (the slug-like creatures) and the Fendahl Core (the formerly human "mind" of the Fendahl) are powerful enough to drain the life force of every single thing on the planet, from humans to protozoa. And the Doctor — "The Oncoming Storm" himself — was terrified of the Fendahl, even as an adult.
  • "There are four thousand million people on this planet. If I'm right, within a year, there'll be just one."
  • The sequence with the skull and Thea has rather poor SFX — the eyes/eye-sockets are mismatched — and yet is absolutely terrifying. The Fendahleen themselves are wibbly-wobbly hissing things, and so completely alien they're scary even when small.
  • Thea's motherfucking eyes. WHO THE HELL THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA TO LET HER HAVE VERTICAL SLITS?
  • At the end, the Doctor promises to throw the Fendahl's skull, which began the whole nightmare, into a supernova. The Expanded Universe says this wasn't enough.
• "The Sun Makers": The Steamer.
• "The Invasion of Time":
  • The Doctor pretending to side with the villain shows how mad and dark he can be.
  • Especially in Part 1 when he was screaming his head off at Borusa.
    • Forget that. How about that creepy-as-hell laugh, complete with full-on evil grin? Every kid in England likely went to bed that night worried that Tom Baker was hiding in their closet.

Season 16

• "The Pirate Planet":
  • The planet that pounces on other planets, killing everything on them. Sweet dreams.
  • The Mentiads. Pale skinned, Kubrick-staring men with horrifying sunken eyes who can hurt you from a distance, and, worse, can apparently make you one of them? Even for an adult those guys are terrifying. And they're supposed to be the good guys!
  • The Captain. Most of the time, he's a rather comical LARGE HAM, but when the Doctor kills his robotic parrot, he suddenly becomes quite calm and very creepy. Particularly when he shows the Doctor what fate he has in store for him:
    Captain: A plank! The theory is very simple. You walk along it. At the end, you fall off. Drop one thousand feet. Dead!
    • And the sudden crashing realization that, as ridiculous a method of execution as it is... it's so simple that there's nothing for the Doctor to latch onto to find an out. If he hadn't prepared his trick well in advance, and couple that with the length of the fall itself, he would have died for good, And let's make this Harsher in Hindsight.. remember how the Fourth Doctor actually did die?
• "The Stones of Blood": The Ogri. Stonehenge-like stone towers that can move around, and one touch from them means instant and very painful death. The worst moment is when an innocent bystander who's camping nearby gets curious and touches the stone, and we get a close up of his hand being skeletonized while his screams echo all around.
• "The Androids of Tara": The android Romana. Imagine someone you trust turning out to be a Killer Robot.
• "The Armageddon Factor": In the early episodes, the Shadow is a vaguely creepy, but not overly scary Large Ham of a villain. That all changes in Part 5, when he reveals that not only is he in the service of the Black Guardian — something that causes the Doctor to immediately go from delivering a Badass Boast to practically crapping his pants — but he engineered the Forever War taking place between the two nearby planets simply so that he wouldn't get bored waiting for the Doctor to show up with the other five Key to Time segments. And said war is what he and the Black Guardian intend to inflict on the entire universe once they have the fully assembled Key.

Season 17

• "Nightmare of Eden":
  • Vraxoin, a drug that can cause total apathy, and has levelled whole civilizations. Yes, anvils can still be Nightmare Fuel.
  • The Captain, high on Vraxoin, laughs openly and mockingly upon seeing the crew and passengers being slaughtered by mandrels.
• "Shada":
  • Skagra's mind-stealing machine.
  • Sure, Salyavin is a nice guy now. But suppose he develops a monomania...

Season 18

• "The Leisure Hive":
  • People visibly being torn apart.
  • Also, the cliffhanger to part one, which features this same incident happening to the Doctor. The last shot of the episode features the camera zooming into the Doctor's screaming mouth, with an added Jump Scare thanks to the show's signature electronic scream coupled alongside the Doctor's. Sure, it may be a jump scare, but it's certainly terrifying.
• "Meglos": Tom Baker as the titular villain, especially when his skin goes all cactus-like.
• "State of Decay" isn't that frightening for a child, but once you get old enough to recognise the sexual undertones... the head vampire really likes Adric and wants to make him a vampire too. Bad touch.
• "Warriors' Gate":
  • The ending. All the secondary characters are wiped out when they accidentally blow their own ship up. Once the dust settles, you see the aliens they'd been keeping as slaves calmly leaving the blackened remains of the ship... aliens which are out-of-synch with time due to just having been revived from comas, meaning they leave eerie after-images everywhere they go.
  • In episode four, when one of the revived Tharils electrocutes one of the slavers. He just flops back on the table with a look of complete terror frozen on his face and his skin instantly pales to an unnatural shade of grey, staring wide-eyed at the camera. Made worse by the fact that most of the crew of the slave ship were characterized as ordinary, blue collar guys just working for a paycheck.
• "The Keeper of Traken": In the final scene, (Feb. 1981) with the crisis resolved and the Doctor departed, Consul Tremas goes to investigate a long case clock that has appeared. He touches the clock face and is unable to move. Unseen by anyone else, the ghoul-like figure of the Master emerges from the clock, gloats "A new body at last", merges with Tremas, and then leaves in the clock, his TARDIS. No blood, no gore, just horror at its understated best.
• The buildup to the Doctor’s regeneration in “Logopolis”. As the Doctor tries to jump for safety, he ends up stuck clinging on for dear life, as the faces of his past foes appear before him, as if compelling him to fall and die. (Which he does).
  The Master: Predictable as ever, Doctor.
  Dalek: Doctor.
  The Captain: Doctor!
  Cyberleader: Doctor.
  Davros: Doctor.
  Stor: Doctor.
  Broton: Doctor.
  The Black Guardian: Doctor! You shall die for this!

Season 19

• "Kinda": The Mara. Otherworldly beings that invade your mind and possess your body because you fell asleep. They are the physical embodiment of Nightmare Fuel. The sequences in Tegan's mind — in the dark, alone — were some of the most blood-chilling ever.
  • It's much, much worse than falling asleep. The Mara can possess you from your dreams... and humans not only go insane and then die if they cannot dream, the only way the Doctor can temporarily suppress the constant micro-dreams a human has — to protect Tegan from the Mara — also renders her deaf and somewhat less than coherent, so the rest of the group end up losing track of her.
• "Black Orchid": What horrific tortures was George Cranleigh subjected to that left him in a mental state halfway between Evil Archer post-agony-booth and the Longbottoms post-Lestranges-and-Crouch?
• "Earthshock":
  • The first enemies encountered by the Redshirt Army blow them into puddles of goo. To be honest, the Cybermen guns are far less horrific (though suitably hammed up by the actors).
  • The Cybermen as they were about to destroy the planet. And then the trauma redoubled itself with Adric's death.
  • A voice box that has apparently been altered to create the illusion of emotions makes the Cyber-Leader even creepier.
• "Time-Flight": The way the Master's Kalid disguise falls when Tegan and Nyssa first interrupt the power. Yuck.

Season 20

• "Mawdryn Undead":
  • Tegan and Nyssa find someone they believe to be the Doctor, covered in blood.
  • Then there was the cliffhanger to Part Two, where they and The Brigadier enter the TARDIS and find the same person, healed, but missing half a skull.

20th Anniversary

• "The Five Doctors":
  • Borusa's fate; that is, he falls for a trap that Rassilon had set to capture megalomaniacs where victims are given "immortality" by getting turned into an inanimate but aware paving slab to forever be nothing more than a decoration on Rassilon's coffin.
  Rassilon: "Others have come to claim immortality through the ages. It was given to them, as it shall be given to you."
  • The Raston Warrior Robot... a lightning-fast killer ninja android that massacred a whole squad of Cybermen. To be fair, some might consider it to be super extra-freaking sweet, but seriously, this thing decapitates one Cyberman, impales a few others and cuts the limbs off of at least two more. ON A KIDS' SHOW!
  • The Time Scoop. Particularly so in the original version, where you can see the frozen and terrified expressions of anyone it captures.

Season 21

• "The Awakening" has the Malus, a being that only knows how to destroy. Oh, and it looks like this...
• "Frontios" had people being sucked under the earth without warning 26 years before "The Hungry Earth"/"Cold Blood".
• "Resurrection of the Daleks" features the titular creatures attacking a space station by unleashing a flesh-dissolving gas upon its crewmembers. The lucky ones die almost instantly on exposure with the gas. One less lucky crewmember only gets a minor dose of the gas and is seemingly fine... until near the end of the first episode, when his face and hands start to dissolve, resulting in another crewmember putting him out of his misery by shooting him.
  • To make it worse, gas like this actually exists and was used in the First World War and other wars. Blister agents such as Lewisite and Mustard gas. Once they come into contact with the skin, they slowly cause the flesh to blister and literally rot off.
• "The Caves of Androzani":
  • Sharaz Jek. He had burns over most of his body, was quite mad, and wore a black body suit and mask that made him look like something you'd see peering in your window at night. Not only that, but he had a very unhealthy obsession with Peri. He's a man who's been stuck in an underground cave for years surrounded by nothing but androids, and as soon as he sees Peri he decides he has to have her because she's so pretty. The implications of her fate had she not escaped with the Doctor are quite unsettling.
  • The whole story is just a horrible situation that pretty much anyone might find themselves in. The Doctor and Peri are hopelessly stuck in the middle of a drug war fought by utterly selfish criminals and sociopaths, who want to hunt them down for the most paranoid and/or selfish reasons.
    Sharaz Jek: These petty criminals are invariably paranoid, their twisted little minds infested with distrust and suspicion.
  • The Doctor nearly getting his arms pulled off by androids.
  • When it's not being a Tear Jerker moment, The Doctor's regeneration is rather intense. The Doctor begins to hallucinate his past companions telling him not to die, and then The Master, whose head is bigger than the rest of the heads, tells him otherwise as the voices echo into a mess, matching the blurry psychedelic visuals before laughing maniacally.
    The Master: No, my dear Doctor, you must die! Die, Doctor! DIE, DOCTOR! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
• "The Twin Dilemma":
  • The Sixth Doctor trying to strangle Peri.
  • From the same story, we have Mestor, a giant alien slug who can kill people telepathically. He can also use people as monitors, burning out their minds in the process. What's more is that he can do it wherever he is.

Season 22

• "Attack of the Cybermen" has a scene where the Cybermen are interrogating Lytton. Then they grab Lytton's hands and crush them, causing them to actually bleed. Is it any wonder why this story got a Mature Rating in Australia?
• "Vengeance on Varos": When an unconscious Sixth Doctor is about to be chucked into an acid bath because the guards think he is dead. Then he moves and the guards try and throw him anyway. The first one is startled and falls in the acid when the supposedly dead Doctor speaks to him. And the first guard pulls the second one in while trying to pull himself out during the struggle. The Doctor's lack of horror at the grisly fate of the guards, even dropping a cold Bond One-Liner as he retrieves his coat, is a little disturbing.
  Doctor: (completely nonplussed) Forgive me if I don't join you.
  • The creepiest part of this scene was before they go to throw the Doctor in, they get rid of another corpse in the acid bath, with horribly creepy music playing as they lower the body in.
• "The Mark of the Rani": The landmines that turn you into a tree.
• "The Two Doctors" has an experiment that tampers with the Doctor's physiology and psychology. Not the Chameleon Arch; an experiment.
• “Timelash” has the Karfelon androids, with their blank and unblinking stares and creepy sing-song voices reminiscent of the Mondasian Cybermen.
  • There’s also The Reveal that the old man who was supposedly the Borad is a lifelike puppet, with wires and what appears to be a battery coming out of the back of his head and body.
• "Revelation of the Daleks":
  • Davros is using the recently dead to turn into Daleks if he finds you mentally superior; if he doesn't you get turned into Soylent Green. The worst part? Kara, the president of the galaxy, knows all this and wants Davros dead so she can control the food supply herself.
  • The poor man being turned into the glass Dalek — the way he screams Dalek slogans, then begs his daughter to kill him: "It is our duty to eradicate all those who wish to pollute the purity of the Dalek race. If you ever loved me, child, then KILL ME!"

Season 23

• "The Mysterious Planet": The scene where Drathro's castle is being raided, and the viewer just knows that the overworlders are going to die, no question about it.
• "Mindwarp": The section where Kiv's brain is transplanted into Peri's body.
• All of "Terror of the Vervoids". Plants will never be seen the same way again.
• "The Ultimate Foe":
  • The exploding feathers quill pens.
  • And the thought that the Doctor could actually become the Valeyard.
  • The Valeyard demonstrates his control over the Matrix by having the sand the Doctor is standing on turn into quicksand and grey hands pulling him into as he screams in terror.

Season 24

• "Paradise Towers":
  • The two old women in the tower block. Something about one of them throwing her black shawl over Mel...
  • The killer robotic cleaners and the machine containing the Ax-Crazy architect. Especially the scene where said Ax-Crazy architect takes over the Chief Caretaker's body.
• "Dragonfire": Kane's face melts. (Don't worry, they just used a wax figurine for that moment.)

Season 25

• "Remembrance of the Daleks":
  • The Special Weapons Dalek. More Dakka combined with Nightmare Fuel. We never see it fire on a human being (and are instead shown its firepower via its total destruction of two enemy Daleks) because there would be next to nothing left if it did.
    • The other Daleks think this one's a homicidal maniac.
  • The girl they shoved into a Dalek command shell. The Daleks took her and used her brain as the wetware for their attack systems.
    • Right off the bat it's shown that there's something up with this girl, given the creepy little song she sings when she first catches sight of the Doctor:
      "Five, six, seven, eight. It's the Doctor at the gate..."
    • She also gets an intensely creepy, nursery rhyme-esque Leitmotif, which sounds like something straight out of an Amusement Park of Doom.
    • She watches people hideously killed by various means and never reacts at all. And at the end of the story, she just walks away like nothing interesting has happened at all... and she's still a Dalek war computer.
  • Moment of note — the Doctor escapes up a staircase and the Dalek follows! Dalek climbing stairs in the Classic Series.
    • Also of note: This is the first time in the series where the graphics are now advanced enough to show people turning see-through when they get zapped by Daleks, revealing their skeletons for a brief moment as they fry.
  • Mike Smith's face when he's killed.
• "The Happiness Patrol", whilst on first viewing is pretty innocuous and has a really unconvincing villain in the shape of the Kandy Man (a giant Bertie Bassett-shaped thing that isn't quite a robot, and definitely isn't nice- being an execution robot with a disturbing squeaky voice and sadistic sense of humour, who enjoys making its victims in, it its own words, "die with smiles on their faces") is actually really fucked up:
  • The story revolves around Helen A and her husband/partner Joseph C who rule a colony on the planet Terra Alpha where it is illegal to be unhappy.
    • The scene that's really nightmarish is when a man is executed by Helen A and Joseph C for the crime of unhappiness. A huge pipe is lowered over his head and molten candy is poured over his head by the Kandy Man. It's not clear if it's boiling hot, or if he drowns with his lungs full of molten sugar, but either way it's very disturbing. This is made even worse when (just before the camera cuts to the next scene) Joseph C leans forward, scrapes some candy off the corpse with his finger and eats it with a grin on his face. Urgh.
• "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy" has a circus straight out of Bradbury/With Monster Clowns and evil eyes/And Big Brother kites up in the sky/The audience lands in the ring/And has to perform for some nasty things/Who rank the act with zip or nine/And if they're amused then you are fine/But if the rank they give is nil/With an energy blast, the act is killed. The image of the clowns driving a hearse in the desert manages to both surreal and deeply sinister. In the darkened circus ring, a horrified Mags then undergoes involuntary transformation into a snarling, fanged, yellow-eyed wolfish humanoid.
• "Silver Nemesis": The Cybermen are supposed to have rid themselves of human emotions and the concept of pain....yet they still scream in agony when killed with gold weapons.
  • At the end of the episode, when Ace (sounding almost desperate) asks the Doctor "Who are you?!"....and he just smiles and holds a finger to his lips. Even if it isn't one of Seven's darker moments, it's still quite unsettling.

Season 26

• "Ghost Light", fun with de-evolution. The fate of the reverend and the police inspector were incredibly disturbing (even if one was meant to be something of a Karmic Death).
• "The Curse of Fenric" featured Alien Vampires, a doubting priest whose holy symbols have no effect on said vampires, and the Ancient One, a giant fishy blue thing who rises from the water.
  • Beneath Maiden's Bay lies the corpse of a recently Haemovore-slain Soviet Commando. With a sudden jolt of incidental music, the corpse's eyes open to stare through the water.
  • In one scene, several women are in a room into which a few Haemovores approach. The next time we see the room, all of the women have become Haemovores.
  • When Fenric decides that he doesn't need the Haemovores, he has the Ancient One turn them to dust.
  • The cliffhanger for Episode 3 has a crippled scientist collapse, dead. Momentarily, he stands up, with glowing eyes, and says "We play the contest again, Time Lord." The beginning of the following episode has the windows shatter after and the man disappear.
  • When Ace reveals to one of the soldiers the way to solve the Doctor's puzzle, thinking Fenric to be dead, only to learn that Fenric has moved into the soldier's body. Lightning promptly shoots through the window and sets the table on fire.
  • And also, as part of a plan to defeat Fenric- which involves him needing to crush Ace's faith in him- when the Doctor was yelling at Fenric about how stupid she was and how much he hated her, while Ace was on her knees, crying.
    The Doctor: You're an emotional cripple. I wouldn't have wasted my time on her, unless I had to use her somehow.
  • Also the fact that though the timeline where humans become Haemovores seems to have been averted, Fenric still has half a million years to try. For all we know, humans becoming Haemovores could be a fixed point, all that could be done was delay it long enough for some humans to leave Earth.
• "Survival": The Cheetah People. Also, the planet that is falling apart around them.

The TV Movie

• Possessed Grace in The TV Movie. Her eyes turn completely black and all the while sports an incredibly creepy grin.
  • In the novelisation, the lead-up to her possession: while following the Doctor's instructions Grace notices that her head is starting to hurt rather badly, and she's seeing her surroundings in a sickly shade of green. And then she hears the Master's voice in her mind repeating the same phrase over and over: Kill the Doctor.
• Shortly after possessing Bruce, the Master discovers the flesh of the man's undead body is starting to rot. His first morbid discovery is that he can rip an entire fingernail off, bloody mess included.
• How the Master takes possession of Bruce's body. Who then proceeds to strangle Bruce's wife the next morning.
• Overjoyed to have regained his memories, the Doctor, via the Eye of Harmony's Psychic Link, sees the Master, and is suddenly staggered with horror. Against a white background flash several increasing close-ups of Eric Roberts' stony-faced, sunglasses-shaded Master, followed by a huge close-up of his hypnotic, greenish-yellow eyes.
• While inhabiting Bruce's body, the Master can now spit yellowish saliva that burns the skin like acid. Grace is wounded by it, leading to her being controlled by the Master near the end of the movie. In the novel of the film, the infection is described as a putrid green rash slowly spreading up her arm.
• The newly-regenerated Doctor finding and pulling the heart probe out of his chest, complete with icky sound effects and visible blood, while screaming in agony.
• The Doctor and Grace are escaping the institution when they come across several guards, all frozen in place covered in the Master's acidic saliva. One of them falls over with sickening crunchy sounds but it immediately cuts to The Doctor and Grace's looks of shock.
• The climax of the movie has the Doctor restrained in a device that will painfully drain away his remaining regenerations and be transferred to the Master.
• The death of the Seventh Doctor. Knowing that you're going to be operated on by people who know NOTHING of your alien biology and being totally helpless to stop them. And being awake (for the most part) while it happens.
• The Eighth Doctor's first day was rather scary. His seventh incarnation dies screaming on the operating table, and due to the anesthesia it very nearly killed him for good. He regenerates hours later and wakes up in the morgue, scaring the worker on duty. He wanders in search of help and clothes, and has no idea of who he really is. He sees Grace, recognizes her, and follows her to her car, desperately pleading for her to help him and take him somewhere else (while extracting the heart probe) out of fear that the surgeons will kill him again.

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