Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 14 (Doctor Who: Image Of The Fendahl)

Oh hey. It's that other space show I like to talk about on this blog. No, not Dirty Pair. Doctor Who! Seems like I'm a little early though, doesn't it? I mean, we've got six whole weeks of a new series looming on the horizon and here I am talking about Tom Baker. We'll deal with Flux when we have to deal with it, and that plus NaNoWriMo will make Mondays interesting. For the time being, it's 1977 and it's time to get spooked. When you think Tom Baker and Doctor Who and spooky season, a whole lot of memorable stories may come to mind that are well-regarded by fandom. I went with a more middle of the road story, as far as fan consensus is concerned. This ranked 122nd in the Doctor Who Magazine 50th Anniversary Poll. Middle of the road. Of course, if you've ever listened to me on the Doctor Who Reviews podcast with Rain and Kat (spooky season bonus: check out our latest episode on State of Decay!) then you know I mock this traditional-minded poll to hell and back and think that it's an opposite world of my own tastes. Where does that leave poor Image Of The Fendahl in my mind?

I dig it. Oh my god wait that's a pun considering they dug up a spooky skull OH FUCKING NO WAIT! Let's salvage this and talk about what I like. The obvious "throw it into a Doctor Who blender" analogy would be to go for Quatermass, a British sci-fi series which Doctor Who drew particular inspiration from for the Jon Pertwee years. A bit of that plus some of its usual "oh this human belief can be explained by ANCIENT ALIENS" stuff that Doctor Who loves to draw from. Of course, being a time traveller watching this thing like 45 years in the future, I was thinking of something else. It's not an influence on the story, least of which because it came out 10 years later. I don't think it drew influence from the story either. What is it? John Carpenter's Prince Of Darkness. Both movies have this feeling, this genre fusion which I'll coin as the technooccult. Occultist magical power mixed with computer power, as advanced as it can be for the time period. Fendahl has the titular death worm aliens (patience, we'll get to that gonzo imagery) in place of Prince Of Darkness's musings on God and Satan, but you've got that same driving force. Modern technology scanning and researching something ancient and occult, something which uses that modernity to power its dark magic and create havoc. Fendahl does this with moody advancing shots in the dense fog-shrouded forest as unseen monsters threaten folks, and it's some real effective spooky imagery.

Then we have those death worm aliens. What a design. I'm sure someone got letters of complaint over them, but I love them. The Fendahleen are suckers of energy, eaters of life itself as we're told, so why not make them a giant alien leech thing? The mix of the occult and the technological turn out to be their undoing, as the old superstitions like salt to ward off evil spirits work just as well on the things. I really like that they're even mythological figures from the Doctor's history as a Time Lord, a thing that his people tried to banish but failed in doing completely, leading that skull to come to Earth and influence human evolution for its cause. We're All Fendahl Down Here, if you will. That's some proper spooky conceptual horror, the fact that humanity itself is a stepping stone for this thing. There's some wilder shit implied offscreen, like gunshot murders that cut away to a dude laying motionless with blood on his head. It's just enough of a "you don't see it" thing to properly horrify you. Is it perfect? I mean, it's very good but it's not the greatest Doctor Who story ever. Still, I'd put it a little higher than middle of the road. It will almost certainly have entertained me more than anything that will come in the next six weeks, but I remain willing to go back on that once we see what's been cooking. Until then, why not throw it on for your spooky season? You could do a lot worse with 100 minutes of your time.