Tuesday 27 April 2010

Weeping Angels by the beach

The Weeping Angels are Doctor Who's best monsters. Unlike some rubbish metal things from space, they're based on real, everyday objects. They take (already quite creepy) church statues and turn them into nasty, feral objects of not-so-mild terror.They're a combination of very simple, powerful ideas. For a start, they're never seen moving. They appear as a series of horrible statues, reaching out to the characters with vicious hands and snarling faces. They only move when unseen, so a blink sends them hurtling forwards, sometimes stopping only an inch from somebody's face. It's this staticness, the idea of something horrible happening behind your back, that makes them so scary. And the only way to stop them is to keep your eyes on them. The idea of not blinking is genius. Anyone can see how hard that is. If you join in it makes the episodes tense and painful.


Hopefully this new two-parter won't go too far with them. Don't want to over do it. 'The Time of Angels' places them into a far more elaborate setting than 'Blink'. This time there's hundreds of them in huge caves. Although more is not necessarily better they are still scary, even if this is more of an action episode than last time. And now they've got a whole new bunch of rules, like how they can kill someone and adapt their consciousness to use their voice. This leads to one poor army boy being mercilessly torn down and used as a speaker - 'They snapped my neck sir. Not as painless as I thought it'd be but quite quick'. As an episode it's all fun stuff and has a few good eerie scares. The full picture's not here yet though. It'll be interesting to see what the second half turns up.

1 comment:

  1. I had dreams about creatures like this when I was a kid, which makes them quite effective for me (I mean the blue scary mask thing).

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