After talking about how the Black Guardian used to scared the hell out of me as a kid on the other thread, it got me wondering about how effective humanoid villains like him, The Master, The Rani etc are at being scary against the more traditional monsters like the Daleks and The Cybermen etc.

Off course logically monsters are more scary, but with the right look and the right voice, any actor can give a monster a run for his money. Valentine Dyall was probably the most scariest humanoid villain there has ever been as he had the look and the voice to match. Even Roger Delgado had that evil look about him as the first Master which would have scared a few kids.

I always find the more colder and clinical a humanoid adversary is, the worse they actually are. I always think Morgus in Caves Of Androzani is one such villain as he's so calm and calculating, you're never sure one hundred per cent sure what he's going to do next and when he does do it, he treats it like a normal everyday task-maybe he likes spending his days throwing people down elevator shafts!

Tobias Vaughn from The Invasion is another who's charm concealed a manic streak which again made him unpredictable at times.

As I said, I'm not stating as fact that Monsters aren't scarier, they obviously are but which Humanoid Villains did you find really disturbing as a kid growing up that put the Monsters in the shade?

I found Dask in the Robots of Death creepy.

I think it depends on the quality of the performance, all your examples are excellent portrayals.

The mercenary type characters in '70s stories are scary - Reegan, Butler, Scorby etc.

Its hard to make an overall judgement on the two types because each and every villain whether they be full monster, humanoid, or just plain human, will have a slightly different affect on you.

What I will say though is that I often find it more exciting when The master or davros turn up and have an understated but tense conversation with the doctor than I do with a scene where an army of a certain species are baying for the doctors blood. I think it makes those kind of characters more interesting that they have shared, personal history with the doctor, and can hurt him as much with words as monsters may be able to by other means.

Monsters can be scary because you know what they are and what they're going to do. The stakes are laid out up front and the scare comes from our heroes being put in front of them.

Human, or at least sentient, villains are scary because you don't know what they're going to do. What's their plan? What tools are at their disposal? When they face off against our heroes, you don't know which way things are going to go, which is why you need the big face-off scenes.

Human and Humanois are scary. Least some of the alliens and creatures are up front about it. They are evil because they were either born or designed/programed to be that way. Humans and humanoids don't have that excuse. They chose to do evil things. For their own greedy selfish reasons. Usually for the old cliches power,money or they just like doing it. S8 will hopefully have a good mix of old/new human/non human baddies for 12 and freinds to face. Fortunately most of teh time the doctor wins!.

That's a good way of saying what I was trying to.

Now that it's morning, I thought of a simpler way to encapsulate what I was trying to say: monster are scary because of what they are. Humans are scary because of what they choose to do.

I remember reading Colin Baker saying he loved The Master because with him, it's personal, as you've just said. It's a bit like the Blake/Travis in Blake's 7 and Banner/McGee thing in The Incredible Hulk and so on. Every hero has one villain who's really got it in for him so as Johnny said, that raises the stakes a lot.

I watched The original Fugitive Series a short while okay and the main character, Dr Kimble, was chased endlessly by Lieutenant Gerard in that. Gerard wasn't in every episode but the ones he was made the show more interesting and alarming than the ones without him because he was the one you were frightened was eventually gonna arrest him and take him in.

I guess it's similar with The Master and any other Time Lord because of the hatred and not only that they share a similar intelligence as well, so that can be quite worrying.

That reminds me of something that was said about Sean Bean's character in Goldeneye.

He was a good Bond villian because he had the one thing most of the other more grandious Bond villians didn't. A reason to want Bond dead! To the others he's just an obsticle as part of a greater plan.

That's another very good example. That personal feuding always makes for a great story, Goldeneye is one of my fave Bond films because of that.

I personally find those who are killing for the sake of it alone scariest, as they have no reason, or no pattern. You can't reason with them, and they enjoy it.

However, I can't think of anything that does that in Doctor Who. I can't remember enough of the classics to say it never happened, so if anoyone knows a character that was like that, I'll look them up!

Its nothing to do with the race most of the times but how they and they're storyline are built.
One of the things that ruined series 6 was that for years its been emphasized how superior the Timelords are, they were inventing time travel whilst we were still in the oceans, they're almost Godlike. And yet humans manage to create a Time Lord in River Song.
To be honest I think Solmon has been the only decent villian in the new series.

I agree to a certain extent - I don't think there's any tension in a character who just kills because that's what they do, it has to be unpredictable to some degree. The cliche is the henchman returning to the evil supervillain to explain that he's failed in his task. You just know that the poor lackey is going to get it. As a viewer, I don't think there's any excitement in a foregone conclusion, no matter how terrifying it is for the doomed character.

Nice way of putting it. I never found the Master particularly scary because Delgado and Ainley (at his best, anyway) were often rather charming, albeit power-crazed and responsible for countless deaths! The exception for me is The Deadly Assassin, which did scare me as a lad.

It's the borderline psychopath/amoral villains I find creepy. Eg Sharaz Jek (although you do end up sympathising with him) Harrison Chase (although Tony Beckley gives such a brilliant performance these days I find the plant-loving loon quite sympathetic too!) The War Lord, The Collector, Hindle (unhinged...fantastic performance) and, of course, Helen A.

These characters have their own agenda. They don't know that they are villains; they're probably the heroes in their own head and the Doctor is the big bad....

A fact Moffat seemed to emphasise in the quote below when describing the 'creature' for whom the pandorica was supposed to hold (which obviously we later found out was the doctor, meaning the myth obviously originated from the point of view of the villains)



“There was a goblin, or a trickster or a warrior. A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. Nothing could stop it or hold it or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world...”


Alway's think that's a brilliant quote and one Moffat's more succesful twists because when you first hear it, it dosen't occur to you it is about the doctor but when you know it is and you read it back it almost couldn't be anyone else.