by Fr. Chris
Doctor Who: An Introduction to Terror, Part 1
4:51 pm in Doctor Who, TV by Fr. Chris
I must have been 4 or 5 years old. All I remember is a flash: a green tentacle wraps around the throat of an unsuspecting man and tightens. The man chokes out a terrified scream. A younger man in odd tan clothing grabs the tentacled creature and throws it to the ground. He has a gun. He shoots the creature until it stops moving.
On the strength of this horrible moment, I didn’t watch Doctor Who again for years. If I even heard the unmistakable strains of the theme music floating through the house, I would demand with tears that my parents turn it off.
And yet, even then, I loved it. I never admitted my fear to my friend James, who can truly be credited with introducing me to the show. We went right on playing Doctor Who in the quite awesome cardboard TARDIS his father made for him.
But from that point on, our games had a different taste to them. When I finally did come back to the show in my early teens, it was with a certain degree of wariness; at any moment something horrifying could occur.
Of course, a rather sad sort of teenage cynicism and jadedness came over me for a few years, and I would only see the cheesiness of the monsters and the cheapness of the effects. For some reason I kept watching.
It was the theme song. It lived in my head and my heart, and does up to this day. What it says is the essence of the show for viewers young and old, fans of 4th, 7th, 10th, or 11th doctors: prepare for an adventure through time and space, and prepare to be afraid.
It was during this period of viewing (spoilers ahead) that I witnessed one of the most shocking events in Doctor Who history; the death of his companion Adric, in the 5th Doctor Episode “Earthshock”. A new reality settled in.
Characters that I knew, people that I cared about, could be in serious danger, and their survival was not guaranteed.
Life would later remind me of this lesson, but it was one for which the Doctor had prepared the ground.
It reminds me of one of my most memorable experiences of fear through a literary source – when my father read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – Fellowship of the Ring to me. I could literally see the caves of Moria in my imagination and hear the drums of Mordor getting louder! It is this that comes to mind when I think of true terror – the enemy knows you are here and is now awake, is now coming… RUN! I read some scary stories books later also, but I don’t remember that they had as much of a permanent emotional impression as Tolkien’s words.
Generally I never had ‘nightmares for days’ or was unable to sleep because I was scared. I would wonder if that experience of terror early on might have immunized me – I was never into ‘scary movies’ (Hellraiser, etc) they were unsatisfying and mostly just gruesome.
Saw some of them later on and found I wasn’t missing much. Ever see ‘Saw’?
I remember I got scared quite badly by watching Total Recall on tv when I was 10. I think I had nightmares for a while. The scene where he put an instrument up his nose to pick something out of his brain particularly freaked me out.
Garth: I remember reading the LOTR trilogy when I was 11 or 12, and couldn’t finish the last book because it was just too scary, sitting up late at night reading that. I think I stopped around the part with the giant spiders in the caves. I eventually read the ending later in high school though.
Yes, Shelob brought all kinds of terrors to me as well. This is definitely a superiority of LOTR to Narnia, that LOTR is more genuinely terrifying.
Shelob was actually the first nightmare inducing moment that I remember in my life. Thanks for commenting, by the way! Tell your friends about us!