Neil Gaiman 'to make Cybermen scary again'

Steven Moffat instructed Neil Gaiman to make the Cybermen "scary again" when providing a brief for the acclaimed writer's 2013 Doctor Who script.

The iconic monsters, last seen in 2011's Closing Time, will be making a triumphant return with a darker side in an episode for the second half of series seven.

Gaiman discussed the story with French website Reviewer.fr:  “Steven wrote to me and said, ‘Will you make the Cybermen scary again?’. And I thought back to when I was 6 or 7 years old – ‘The Moonbase’, ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’… I saw these when they were first broadcast.”

”Daleks went around going, ‘Exterminate’, and blowing things up,” he said. “Cybermen were just… You look up and there’s a Cyberman.”

“I thought, ‘Let me see what I can do when I take the 1960s Cybermen and [incorporate] everything that’s happened since’. So that’s what I’m trying to do. I don’t know if it will work.”

The story is currently in production in Cardiff with Matt Smith, Jenna-Louise Coleman and guest cast Warwick Davis, Tamzin Outhwaite and Jason Watkins.

(Source: Anglophenia)