The Weeping Angels were introduced in the 2007 episode "Blink" and became recurring characters across a variety of Doctor Who media.

Moffat was inspired by a variety of sources, including an encounter with a statue in a graveyard, which mysteriously disappeared when he returned to view it at a later date.

Since their initial appearance, the Weeping Angels have been repeatedly nominated as one of the most popular and frightening Doctor Who monsters.

An Angel is able to enter Amy's mind through a video recording and threatens to take form using the image left in her brain.

Following this, the Angels appear in various cameo roles, such as in the episodes "The Time of the Doctor",[5] "Hell Bent",[6] and "Revolution of the Daleks".

[7] The Angels also briefly appear in the finale episode of the spin-off series Class, where they are revealed to have masterminded events behind the scenes.

The village becomes assailed by Angels, who are attempting to recapture Claire, a woman they had previously hunted in the episode "The Halloween Apocalypse".

[11] 2021 Mobile game Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins depicts the Angels from "Blink" attempting to get their revenge following the episode's events.

[14] The Angels are also depicted in several easter egg and cameo roles in other video games, such as Call of Duty: Black Ops III,[15] Lego Dimensions,[16] and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

Though Moffat attempted further research into the statue in the years after the Weeping Angels appeared on-screen, their popularity made this much more difficult.

[20] Moffat was inspired by other sources, such as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that observation can affect the results of an experiment, as well as the concept of children covering their eyes when seeing something scary.

[24] Moffat originally planned to have a Weeping Angel act as the main antagonist of the 2015 episode "Heaven Sent", but this was scrapped in development.

[5][26][28][29] The Angels make a brief reappearance in the finale of the spin-off series Class, where they are revealed to be manipulating events behind the scenes.

[33] The Weeping Angels have been consistently popular antagonists, with various reviews and polls ranking them as being among the most terrifying monsters in the series' history.

[34][35][36] Huw Fullerton, writing for the Radio Times, stated that the Angels are "genuinely disturbing", highlighting their specific style of movement in aiding in this.

[36] The book Envisioning Legality stated that the Angels acted as terrifying antagonists due to them turning a victim's own bodily functions and flaws, such as blinking, against them.

[38] Creator Steven Moffat attributed their appeal to childhood games such as Grandmother's Footsteps and the notion that any stone statue might secretly be a disguised Weeping Angel.

He stated that while their horror element was effectively utilized during the early acts of the episode, he felt that the episode robbed the Angels of their mysterious nature by giving them concrete motivations and many new powers and abilities that Whitbrook felt made the Angels weaker threats as a whole.

[21] The book Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside, analyzed the role of the Weeping Angels in the show.

They stated what made the Weeping Angels terrifying was for their ability to upend people's lives, which induces a fear of powerlessness in viewers as a result of how difficult it is to combat the Angels individually, and that doing an action as minor as blinking can result in a person having their life ripped away from them.