31 Days, 31 Screams: Day 22 (Doctor Who: Blink)

If you know the later rule of Weeping Angels,
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T LOOK TOO LONG AT THIS.

Back to the world of Doctor Who, and like some mad time traveller we have jumped ahead in time by 32 years. The days of dodgy rubber suits are gone now in 2007, and in its wake we have all the wonders of CGI... or what the BBC can afford in 2007. For all of that, though, this is the low-budget one of 2007. It is a "Doctor-Lite" which has the Doctor, who is now David Tennant, take on a passive role as he is not the central focus. Its "monster" is nothing more than stone statues, for god's sakes! How in the world do you make that scary? Answer: Be Steven Moffat. Moffat, if nothing else, is very fond of the same conceptual horror bits that make things like A Nightmare On Elm Street terrifying. His specialty is creating alien monsters that operate on arcane rules somehow linked to the involuntary natural processes of human beings. Admittedly, in later years he will come to rely on this well a bit too much; Series 8 of Doctor Who containing at least three instances of this. Here, in 2007, we're free of that! This is the basis of it all, his first go at it... and holy fuck did he succeed. This is Blink, and it is terrifying.

Certainly, I can attest to this because I was there-ish. Back then the episodes aired months later on the CBC in Canada, and I had no computer of my own to fully torrent with reckless abandon. Doctor Who would not quite take off on this side of the pond until the aforementioned Moffat years, but for now I had no real idea what to expect other than a hasty trailer where the Doctor told us not to blink or we'd die. So it was that, with best friend visiting, we both sat back to watch the tale of terror before us. The poor sod had to walk back home after that, in the dark. Rewatching Blink and knowing of all the Moffat horrors and re-use of their central monster that would come defanged them, so to speak... but I still remember being goddamned petrified in 2007 when I watched this. The sheer brilliance of Blink comes from its monster, the Weeping Angels. To explain: they are creatures that appear to be harmless stone statues. They are actually using some sort of defense mechanism, and are powerful predators. When observed, they're simple statues. When unobserved, they can move at lightning speed. Even a fraction of a second when you are not actively observing them will allow them to move, including... you guessed it, the act of blinking. A semi-involuntary bodily function, but one we eventually need to do nonetheless. Oh, but they don't kill you if you blink and let them get to you. No. They banish you into the past, and you live out the rest of your life isolated from your own time. You may find happiness back there, but it's the potential in your own time that was snuffed out that the Angels desire; they feed on it. They literally eat everything that you could have been for sustenance. Even imagining it is terrifying, and we see a few cases of it in the episode itself.

The further brilliance would later be retconned, but here it is pure: the fourth wall is nonexistant for the purposes of the Angels and their defense mechanism. If they're onscreen, they cannot move. Even if the characters in the episode are not observing them, we are, and that is enough to keep them in place. The key of the episode, and the most terrifying scene on first watch, is the climax in the basement. The Angels point at a light bulb, causing interference. It flickers in a strobe effect, darkening the room for both the characters in peril and us, and with each flash of the light the Angel has gotten closer. In the end, though, the Angels are undone by their own rules and tricked to look at each other, forever keeping them in a state of observation. Of course, rules are made to be broken, and they will in the future. Speaking of the future, this episode is a temporal goddamned mess. A "predestination paradox" would be the term, or we could use the infamous bit of Doctor Who technobabble introduced in this episode: "Timey-wimey." We see it when main heroine Sally Sparrow's friend is banished to 1920, as the letter delivered to Sally explaining that the friend has been banished and lived out her life in full is actually delivered before said friend is banished in the first place! Smaller loops inside bigger ones, as it turns out that the only reason the Doctor knew everything he did to help Sally out from his own stranding in 1969 was because Sally encounters him at the end of the episode, before it's happened to him, and gives him all of the information he'll need. Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey. Blink is still actually pretty scary if you let yourself think about it. The final shots, overlaying David Tennant's "blink and you're dead" monologue over shots of real-life statues, seem to suggest that any statue could be a Weeping Angel ready to kill you. Indeed, in five years we'll have the goddamned Statue of Liberty as a Weeping Angel. For now, though, Steven Moffat has created a new kind of sci-fi conceptual horror. It is one he will milk for most of its worth in time, but here at the beginning it is pure, it is deadly, and it can only be halted in one way.


Don't blink.