The creatures in Doctor Who's Time Of Angels are not the only quantum-locked creepers in horror history...

One thing I particularly enjoy about the sensibilities of new Doctor Who producer Steven Moffat is his love of classic gothic horror. The last time that Doctor Who was as creepy as Moffat seems intent on making series five was during the early days of Tom Baker in the mid-1970s, when Hammer Horror and the supernatural were - often controversially - inserted into Who storylines (such as The Brain Of Morbius, a Frankenstein-based tale).

Moffat's creepiest contribution to Who's vast canon of monsters are, of course, the 'quantum-locked' weeping angels, the stealthy stone demons which return in tonight's episodeThe Time Of Angels, a story concluding with next week's Flesh And Stone. These Moffat-creations first appeared in season 3's Blink, a doctor-lite episode which introduced Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan, who no doubt refused a much-requested stint as a Who assistant to pursue her burgeoning film career) and resulted in one of the most praised and popular episodes of new Who since it began in 2005.

The Weeping Angels are frozen if observed, but look away for just one millisecond and they are free to pounce on you...

The 'horror which grows imperceptibly nearer' has had a few runs before the Weeping Angels came along, most notably in the original novel of Stephen King's The Shining, where the haunted Overlook hotel is surrounded by topiary sculptures of lions which follow very much the same pattern of approach as Moffat's quantum-locked terrors...

The above clip is from ABC's 1997 mini-series adaptation of King's novel. Stanley Kubrick's lauded 1980 adaptation transmuted the hedge-monsters into a maze, since Kubrick did not feel that the beasts could be rendered effectively on film, and apparently didn't share the terror they inspired in the novel's readers.

Another notable presence of horror that creeps up while you are not looking is in M.R. James' short story The Mezzotint, in which an acquired artwork changes in subtle ways during the night, and a mysterious figure gradually appears... but this ghostly narrative never develops when anyone is actually viewing the work...

"It was indubitable--rankly impossible, no doubt, but absolutely certain. In the middle of the lawn in front of the unknown house there was a figure where no figure had been at five o'clock that afternoon. It was crawling on all fours towards the house, and it was muffled in a strange black garment with a white cross on the back...

...From five to seven the three companions sat and watched the picture by turns. But it never changed. They agreed at last that it would be safe to leave it, and that they would return after Hall and await further developments."

In 1986 Robert Powell narrated The Mezzotint as part of a season of M.R. James semi-dramatised chillers leading up to Christmas, and this particular story is currently available on YouTube (part 1, part 2).

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