Doctor Who: How the Fourth Doctor’s era shaped my love of horror

Horror and monsters have been a core part of Doctor Who for a long time. But perhaps the era that captured the horror genre best was Tom Baker’s.

I am a massive fan of horror. Whether its stories of pure suspense like Psycho or the original Halloween, or disgusting body horror like The Fly or The Thing, I absolutely love the genre. And the very roots of that love began with Doctor Who.

In the beginning, I genuinely hated being scared. Hated it. (Or at least, I thought I did.) So understandably, the horror genre had no appeal to me.

Plus, let’s be honest: a lot of horror is usually made with adults in mind, and understandably so. You get some horror made for the younger audience, like Goosebumps or Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. And it’s fantastic that stories like this are being made with children in mind, but they’re few and far between.

Which is why I’m always grateful when Doctor Who does a good horror episode. We got plenty of genuinely creepy or scary stories in Steven Moffat’s era and even Russell T Davies’s. As for myself, the first scary stories I watched were from Tom Baker’s classic period…

Whether it was Cybermen, mummies or Krynoids, Tom Baker’s run in Doctor Who was an era of monsters!

(Photo by Frank Barratt/Getty Images)

A slight bias

A while back, to celebrate the great man’s 85th birthday, I did a list of my top ten favorite Tom Baker stories. While I was pretty happy with the stories I had selected, someone pointed out the very fair observation that there was a particularly heavy focus on his first three seasons, as produced by Philip Hinchcliffe and script-edited by Robert Holmes. In fact, out of all ten stories selected, only one of them wasn’t from those early seasons!

I hold my hands up: there was more than a little bias there. Tom Baker had four more seasons after that period, and while they were arguably more inconsistent, there were definitely a few gems there, too.

But as a horror fan, those early seasons captured the genre best. No, more important than that: they made me a fan of horror in the first place. They helped me to learn to appreciate being scared, and it did it in a safe way, too. Yes, there were always terrifying monsters, and there was a lot of death, too. But you always knew that the Doctor would be there to save the day. It helped make the scares more thrilling and enjoyable, and made me realize that being scared was better, and felt safer, than simply being anxious, at least when it was handled right.

The art of the scare

Plus, I also began to learn that there was an art to scaring the audience. It wasn’t just about things jumping out of the closet and saying “Boo!” It was about the build-up, about setting up a scene so perfectly that the scare really pays off.

One of the best examples of this was the first death scene in The Robots of Death. When I first watched it, I didn’t know of the story’s reputation, and was a little dubious over the extremely basic title. I had watched plenty of Doctor Who already by that point, and naturally had watched many characters die, so I didn’t think I’d be too creeped out.

I was wrong. Everything, and I mean everything about that key death scene in the story freaked me out. The angles, the creepy music by Dudley Simpson, the claustrophobia, the gradual realization that something is wrong before the robot’s hands start to reach out for your throat…it’s a brilliantly executed scene, one that freaked me out in a way that no other story or film had ever done before. It made me think that all horror films with a higher rating than a PG must be a thousand times more terrifying! (Though of course I eventually learned that to be far from the case.)

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Appreciating the genre

It was because of well-handled moments like this example that made that era of Doctor Who so fantastic. It also helped me to appreciate the genre a great deal more, too. To appreciate when a story was suspenseful, or stylish, or even just gross! (Seriously, there were definitely more than a few stories that pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable for family-friendly viewing back then! It’s no wonder that Mary Whitehouse became so annoyed with the show!)

It’s unsurprising that Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat and other writers have written many scary stories for the New Series. They would’ve grown up on those scares even more than I did. And I hope that horror will continue to be a part of Doctor Who for a long time to come.

Did Doctor Who help you to enjoy being scared? What’s your favorite scary moment from the series? Let us know in the comments below, and if you’re a Whovian who’s also a fan of horror in general, be sure to check out fellow FanSided site 1428 Elm for all your horror needs!