Doctor Who & Horror: How Much is Too Much?

Doctor Who has always been known and even loved for its scary moments, but just how far can it go with its horror?

One of the best things about Doctor Who is that it can tell a story of almost any genre. While it’s always been broadly science fiction (very broadly at times), it has told many stories that have been predominantly other genres along the way. Some examples are the pure historical stories of ‘Marco Polo’ and ‘The Aztecs,’ the light-hearted comedy of ‘The Lodger,’ and the heartbreaking drama of ‘Vincent and the Doctor.’ But my favourite genre of story for the show, and certainly one that’s proven to be very successful over the years, is horror.

With a large focus on evil aliens that usually get labelled as “monsters” throughout many of the show’s stories, plus the virtual guarantee that someone in the guest cast will get killed off, there’s always at least been a hint of it in the show. In fact, the further the show goes into the genre, the more popular the stories seem to be: ‘The Empty Child,’ ‘Blink,’ and ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ are arguably still regarded as modern classics.

In particular, the early years of Tom Baker — with Robert Holmes as script editor and Philip Hinchcliffe as producer — were and still are some of my favourite seasons of the show, due to their high focus on horror stories with high body counts. Stories like ‘Pyramids of Mars’ and ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’ were gloriously stylish serials that didn’t pull any punches. The eight-year-old me loved it. Even as an adult, I still love it, and feel like I’m eight years old again watching these stories.

But when it comes to horror, how much is too much, especially for a show like Doctor Who? Where exactly do you draw the line? You want to scare the children, and possibly the adults too, but you don’t want to traumatise them. Doctor Who isn’t Supernatural, which has gotten away with shocking amounts of violence at times, and it shouldn’t try to be. Doctor Who tells stories across a lot of genres, but I think that the most important thing it needs to be is ultimately a family show.

It always amuses me when I read comments online about why children shouldn’t watch Doctor Who, when they’re arguably the most important audience. In the eighties, the show did try to move toward being less family-friendly, with stories like ‘Vengeance on Varos’ and ‘Revelation of the Daleks’ being not just violent, but rather grim, too. They are enjoyable stories in their own right, but as a kid, perhaps off-putting.

This is kind of funny, considering that I mentioned that, as a kid, I enjoyed the horror and death of Tom Baker stories. So what made those different, and why do I think they’re more acceptable to a child-friendly audience?

Oddly enough, I think the fact that those stories were clearly horror helped digest the violence more, particularly when the violence usually involved “monsters” attacking humans instead of humans attacking each other, as the mid-80s seemed to focus on. And while the early Tom Baker seasons certainly pushed limits at times (a rather bloody shooting in ‘The Brain of Morbius’ instantly springs to mind), I don’t think it quite exceeded them as some moments in the eighties did.