CultBox asked you to vote for the Doctor Who story that frightens you the most.

Here we count down the results of the poll…

 

#2: ‘Midnight’ (15.5%)

As taut and well-constructed a 45 minutes of Who as Russell ever gave us (yes, it’s that good), Season 4’s ‘Midnight’ shares with the poll’s winner an interest in putting a creepy spin on a playground familiar – only this time round, it’s not ‘Grandmother’s Footsteps’ but the trick deployed by the deliberately annoying of repeating everything you’ve just said (everything you’ve just said).

It’s a clever evocation of the politics of the playground in a story where the true horrors are to be found in the way social groups club together to pick on the outsider. Val betrays her prejudices when assuming that the Doctor is ‘like an immigrant’, and it’s this brutal bigotry, as much as the machinations of Lesley Sharp’s sharp-eyed golem figure, which prompts the collective act of cowardice that sees the Doctor voiceless, misapprehended and oppressed.

It’s the kind of subtlety you’d expect from a story which keeps the alien threat undefined and ambiguous, and the human threat horribly real.

 

#1: ‘Blink’ (39.3%)

There was never any doubt about what was going to be in first place. Steven Moffat’s ‘Blink’ hit the ground running in 2007 and did the unthinkable: created a new enemy worthy to rank as a fan favourite, alongside the Daleks and Cybermen.

Looking again at the opening scenes now, it’s clear that, in the hands of a lesser writer, this could have been all a bit Scooby Doo, as two plucky young women investigate a mystery in a spooky and abandoned house. But ‘Blink’ successfully has its cake and eats it too: at once, coming over as both chillingly traditional and a postmodern take on the obsessive habits of the t-shirt wearing, DVD-watching über-geek.

Like all good ideas, the Weeping Angels have the genius of simplicity, and the episode as a whole has the advantage of being something that, should you be of a certain age, you could enact with four of your mates in the playground. Or the office.

But let’s take time to acknowledge that this is pure poetry too – ‘It’s the same rain’ – and the poetry counterpoints the horror. All this, plus it’s got Carey Mulligan being brilliant and Brian Cant’s son in a (ahem) blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo. Was it ever not going to win?

 

Which Doctor Who episode do you find scariest? Let us know below…