The monsters are coming...
Doctor Who is back this weekend and with it the Daleks. But they're not the only monsters to have made an impact on our travelling Time Lord.
Since the show returned in 2005 there have been loads of new creations. And while not all of them were winners remember the Hoix and those rubbish fish guys from "The Doctor's Daughter"? there have been plenty that have chilled us to the bone. Well, given us a shiver or two, anyway.
10. The Ood
Are they really monsters? Maybe not at heart, but in design the Ood are a classic Doctor Who creation. With just a simple rubber mask, some tentacles and a jumpsuit, an ordinary extra instantly becomes a member of this gentle - but prone to possession - alien species. Oh, and they're all linked by a gigantic pulsing brain that can swallow people, for some reason.
9. The Family's scarecrow army
Scarecrows are a classic horror trope, but that doesn't rob the Family's puppets of their eerie power. A shambling straw horde, they're immune to machine gun fire and quite able to kill a man with their wicker hands. Let's just gloss over the question of why their creator made them all look so bloody sinister.
8. The gas mask zombies
For a brief moment back in 2005, there was just one question on everybody's lips: Are you my mummy?
The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances proved conclusively that this new Doctor Who wasn't afraid to push the boundaries when it came to tea-time terror. The child of the title was an eerie figure decked out in a World War 2 gas mask who kept repeating that oddly sinister mantra. Those he encountered would also turn into zombies, their faces stretching and warping and cracking into similar gas masks. Terrifying.
6. The Silence
The Silence aren't really a species at all - they're a religious order. That said, they're mostly represented by an alien species that are generally known as Silents, so we're probably splitting hairs here.
Like the Weeping Angels, the Silence have an unsettling special skill. As soon as you turn away from them, you forget they were ever there. And, as if that wasn't enough, they can shoot lightening from their hands, which is probably useful, we dunno.
Their motivation may have been muddy at times, but the Silence did at least look very cool and menacing. And, in an unexpected switcheroo, they fought alongside the Doctor in Matt Smith's final adventure.
6. The virus from The Waters Of Mars
Water always wins, says the Doctor in The Waters Of Mars. He proves himself wrong by saving the day once again, but not before a lot of people have been infected by a weird alien virus that gives a scary, scaly mouth that's more devil fish than trout pout.
Zombies are nothing new in Doctor Who, but these guys, with their constant dribbling and mad eyes, are some of the nastiest.
5. The Foretold
When is a mummy not a mummy? When it's really the living remains of a soldier who should have died a long time ago.
Equipped with a teleport and state of the art battle tech, the Foretold is able to live indefinitely, but only by feeding on the energy of other living beings. He's quite a tragic being, really. But sod all that, the Foretold's appeal is simple: he's a really gross-looking mummy that kills people.
4. The Beast
Another alien that's shrouded in mystery, the Beast from ace Tennant two-parter The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit is a (literal) giant of evil. Trapped beneath the surface of Krop Tor in chains, he's an immortal (or at least ancient) being that has the ability to get inside the minds of weak humans. Is he the devil himself? He might just be.
To add to the terror factor, the Beast is voiced by the deliciously sinister sounding Gabriel Woolf (who long-term fans will remember as the voice of Sutekh from Pyramids Of Mars). Deadly and eloquent? Helluva combination.
3. The creature in Midnight
We don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is. But there's something outside the Doctor's shuttle on the planet Midnight. It possesses people, then mimics others speech as it begins to learn our language. And, in the episode's most alarming moment, it even predicts what the scared humans will say. At the end we don't know if the thing is alive or dead, and we never learn its name or intentions, but it seriously rattled the Doctor and how many monsters do that?
2. The Boneless
These mysterious aliens from last year's Flatline are two-dimensional villains in a literal sense. They're breaking through into our reality from a universe where very different laws of physics apply. And brrrrrrr, were they creepy
Their ability to flatten people and objects was freaky enough, but the moment they manifest as a gang of lurching, shifting, glitching inhuman figures is scariest Doctor Who moment since Blink.
1. The Weeping Angels
New Who's most iconic creation. Their original episode, Blink, hinged on a simple idea a sort of time-travelling (we're not going to use that wretched other phrase) game of Grandmother's Footsteps, but with deadly consequences. The Weeping Angels look like statues and can move in the blink of an eye.
The genius of their creation is that, if you want to survive an encounter with one of the angels, then you have to stare right at its horrible face. Just a momentary lapse and you're projected back into the past.
Follow up episodes have used them less effectively (let's not get into that the Statue of Liberty is an Angel business here), but for their horrible looks and the sheer creepiness of their concept, these guys are the obvious winner.
