To anyone seeking to understand the unique tone of Doctor Who, it can sometimes help to consider the show as an ongoing series of horror movies, but for kids.
That’s one of the many reasons why a story like “Blink” is so affecting, as it’s a kind of Scooby Doo mystery in which creepy statues move and if you get caught, you get old – truly a fate worse than death for any young viewer hiding behind a cushion.
And if you look carefully, you can see several monsters and tropes from classic horror embedded into some of the best-loved Doctor Who storylines.
1. Frankenstein
Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, actually appears in a Doctor Who story – “The Haunting of Villa Diodati,” set during the storms in which she was challenged to write a scary tale – to make a very clear parallel between her book and the development of the Cybermen. But that’s not the only time the show has used the idea of someone giving new life to old bodies.
In “The Brain of Morbius,” Mehendri Solon attempts to craft a new body for an old Time Lord using bits of other creatures. And, reversing that idea, Uncle (from “The Doctor’s Wife”) uses parts of old Time Lords to keep his servants alive. But the most direct reference to this most gothic of classic horror monsters occurred way back in the First Doctor story “The Chase,” in which a robot version of the famous movie incarnation of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster rises up from a laboratory bench.
2. The Island of Doctor Moreau
In H.G. Wells’ unsettling novel, we see a mad scientist creating a race of twisted humanoid beings using mutation and vivisection. Put that scientist into a wheelchair that looks like a metal skirt with acne and you’ve got Davros, leader and creator of the Daleks.
Give him the ability to regenerate and you’ve got the Rani, who was essentially exiled from her native Gallifrey for creating a race of super-mice. And that plan by the Master (in “The End of Time”) to rewrite the DNA of everyone on earth so that they would become him? That’s a REALLY mad scientist.
3. Werewolves
True lycanthropes don’t tend to feature a lot in Doctor Who stories, apart from that one time when one was gunning for Queen Victoria, the Tenth Doctor and Rose (“Tooth and Claw”).
That said, Seven and Ace did meet a werewolf from Vulpana called Mags in “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.” Vulpana is a planet with four moons, so lycanthropy became part of their evolution. And to bring two tropes together, the section of the Sixth Doctor story arc “The Trial of a Time Lord” that is known as “Mindwarp” features biological experimentation which transforms a former equerry of King Yrcanos into a very wolfish humanoid called the Lukoser.
4. Dracula
Count Dracula is another horror staple who appears as part of the Doctor’s journey through fantasy in “The Chase.” But for true gothic vampire horror, the best place to look is the Fourth Doctor creepfest “State of Decay,” in which a medieval town on an E-Space planet is being terrorized by the Three Who Rule – ancient space travelers who became vampires, plotting to resurrect King Vampire, ancient enemy of Gallifrey.
“The Curse of Fenric” has similar creatures, but without Dracula’s sense of style. The Haemovores were a possible evolutionary future for humanity – some 500,000 years into the future – mutated by chemical slime and pollution. They could survive on seawater or blood, thanks to a similar salt content, and could only be killed by a stake to the heart. 
Then there’s “The Vampires of Venice,” of course, a story that owes more than a passing nod to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in that pale women are avoiding sunlight and being used as walking juice boxes by sharp-toothed creatures of the night.
5. Invasion of the Bodysnatchers
Possession is such a classic trope of horror movies that it’s hard to pin on one specific tale. And that’s also true of Doctor Who. Over the course of the show’s history we have seen aliens using human blood to alter their behavior (“The Christmas Invasion”), a sun taking over the bodies of humans (“42”), and a anthromorphic flap of human skin possessing the mind of Rose Tyler (“New Earth”).
Elsewhere, the Master permanently took over the body of Nyssa’s father (“The Keeper of Traken”), the Family of Blood inhabited four humans (“Human Nature”) and an unnamed being entered the mind of Sky Silvestry, causing no end of paranoid havoc (“Midnight”).  And then there’s the Zygons. They don’t actually possess people so much as kill them and take on their lives – like the shape-shifter in The Thing, which is incredibly creepy. But really the true horror is seeing them in the flesh. They look like a squid and a jellyfish tried to breed humans in a vat of purple dye.
6. Mummies
This one has come up surprisingly often, with service robots being dressed as Egyptian mummies in “Pyramids of Mars,” the First Doctor wrapping his Time Lord foe the Monk in bandages to hide him during “The Daleks’ Master Plan”).
Then there’s the Foretold, the literal “Mummy on the Orient Express” who would appear only to the person it was due to kill, giving it a sixty-six second head start.
But for an actual genuine reanimated mummy, we have to look to the parasite planet of Akhaten. The rings surrounding Akhaten were blessed with a pyramid, and that pyramid contained a mummy in a glass case, whose job it was to wake its godly host if certain sacrifices were not made. It’s less of a monster and more of a grisly alarm clock.
7. Night of the Living Dead
In the Doctor Who canon of classic monsters, the Cybermen are the closest to fulfilling the role of zombies. They consume and convert people, advancing slowly and mostly wordlessly as they attack. Missy even compared them to zombies in “The Doctor Falls,” and she should know.
This was after that time when she reanimated human corpses as Cybermen in “Dark Water” / “Death in Heaven,” and according to events in “World Enough and Time,” a previous incarnation of her Masterly self had invented the Mondasian Cybermen in the first place.
8. The Blair Witch Project
Doctor Who has played host to both witches and witch-finders down the years. The Tenth Doctor’s battle with the three Carrionites (“The Shakespeare Code”) was sufficient to inspire William Shakespeare to write his coven into Macbeth. The Third Doctor was brought into a pagan cult of black and white witchcraft in “The Dæmons,” and Martha Tyler was given witch-like powers of second sight thanks to the time fissure at Fetch Priory (“Image of the Fendahl”).
The flip side to seeing actual acts of magic is the brutal superstition of wise women, or anyone with suspicious skills in pre-technological times. So we see 17^th century ducking stools in “The Witchfinders” and “The Woman Who Lived, ” time-traveling companions locked up for witchcraft (“The King’s Demons”), the spectral presence haunting Caliburn House being dubbed ‘the witch of the well’ (“Hide”), and Clara Oswald threatening to turn Elizabethan soldiers into frogs (“The Day of the Doctor”).
9. Black Sabbath
There are three Doctor Who stories that dabble thoroughly in occult matters, the first being “The Dæmons,” in which the Third Doctor encounters a huge demonic beast that towers above him, the second being “Battlefield,” in which the Seventh Doctor encounters a huge demonic beast that towers above him, and the third being “The Satan Pit,” in which the Tenth Doctor encounters a huge demonic beast that towers above him.
Each story makes good use of local superstition and eerie happenings and leave a suggestion that Satan – in the Whoniverse, at least – may have an extra-terrestrial origin.
10. Ghostbusters
The Doctor has been fairly rigid in their belief that ghosts do not exist, a prejudice that seems to have been reinforced by their experiences with the spectral apparitions in “Hide,” “Image of the Fendahl,” “The Unquiet Dead,” and “Army of Ghosts.” Possibly the closest to an actual haunting occurs in “Under the Lake,” where an underwater base is laid siege by the spectral presence of the very dead Albar Prentis. 
To fully underline the Scooby Doo origins of most Doctor Who apparitions, “The Talons of Weng-Chiang” even has Magnus Greel projecting a holograph of a ghost to protect his lair — a trick later stolen by the Doctor in “After the Flood.” It wasn’t under a haunted fairground, but it may as well have been.
Do you have a favorite spooky Doctor Who story?