Spearhead From Space

One of the fortuitous aspects to growing up without a new Season of Who - but with a clutch of the best stories to enjoy on video - is that one of my childhood seasons was the scariest ever. It began with expressionless robots, arms outstretched, continued on with those terrifying Autons stalking through the woods and culminated with the eerie Wirrn in the Ark. Okay, it wasn't quite like that - if truth be known I was a little too old to be truly terrified by any Doctor Who by that time, and the videos were purchased over a matter of months, not every week. But some of the new Who that the arrival of VHS brought was truly some of the most chilling ever.

There isn't much Doctor Who that is scary. You can count the moments on one hand, two if you're being generous. For a start, the oldest episode is now fifteen years old (cripes) and unfortunately the TV Movie wasn't scary at all (unless you count the amount of money they spent on the console room). But this assumes that no show made for teatime twenty years ago on a shoestring budget could be scary - wrong. The nice thing about Doctor Who was that, like a devious psychiatrist, it deliberately tapped into your "things". And everyone has a different "thing". Some people have a "thing" with spiders ("Planet of the Spiders"), others possession ("Pyramids of Mars"), robots ("Robots of Death") or drowning ("Warriors of the Deep"). Don't scoff at the last one - the quality of story has no bearing on how scary it can be. If it contains your "thing", then it's scary.

We must be careful not to confuse gore or horror with scariness. If Doctor Who's chill factor relied on blood or body horror, it wouldn't have been allowed to put the wind up anyone - for the slightest trace of blood or dismembered limbs always gave Mary Whitehouse the ammunition she needed. And while visual unpleasantness always sent you behind your hands (I couldn't watch Sharez Jek's burned face for example) it was a quick, awkward scare. The really scary bits of Doctor Who had to be the ones that could follow you upstairs at night once the TV had been switched off. And that's where crafty old Who must have frustrated the NVLA most of all; they couldn't complain if the Doctor trod on an icky birds egg, for example, or if there was an evil face in a wall, or if a man dressed as a shop window dummy walked through a jungle. But these were the things that scared me in Doctor Who. The moments from the video era didn't give me nightmares of course, but these twenty-year-old programmes still gave me the slight creeps. I dread to think of what they would have done to me if I'd watched them when I was eight!

As it stood, the moments that really scared me as a child are disparate and not really logical. I didn't mind the Daleks at all (who was really scared of those anyway?) or even the Cybermen or the Master. But Shockeye and his butchers knife made me afraid to go to bed for ages! And there was something about those two girls in "Fenric" that got to me too. The theme of innocence lost is common to both those instances, if you think about it. Both feature young girls being targeted by evil, although the idea of being eaten got to me the most. The reason why I suspect I would have also found "Spearhead from Space" frightening is different - like "The Robots of Death", it's the idea of something relentlessly chasing you, something that won't give up. While the Robots on the Sandminer "never tire", neither do the Autons who will rampage through those woods until they find you. Perhaps that's similar to Shockeye and his unstoppable quest to boil up Peri as well.

Wasn't it telling that when the Autons returned the next year, the masks had been made less frightening, almost as if the makers of the show didn't understand that it was the blank eyes and grin that had made them so terrifying. That theme of innocence corrupted again I suppose, a happy face hiding something bad. It only demonstrated that Doctor Who's quest to scare was very much a stab-in-the-dark affair. Often they failed completely to scare at all, sometimes they mistook horror for fear. But just occasionally - as in "Spearhead from Space" - they got it just right.