Monster House....no, wait! It's Harry Potter!

Originally this was going to be an analysis of Monster House, but the library didn't have it. I got out a low budget horror film with a ludicrous cover, Equinox, instead. But then my parents decided it was family Harry Potter night; so now you're getting my 2 am analysis of Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince. Ahem.

Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror
Harry Potter does not evoke any sense of cosmic horror, that is, of some primordial fear of the unknown that modern materialism has tried to squash out. True, the magic does not exist in reality, but it functions in ways familiar to us through faerie tales and folklore, and takes our modern sciences for granted, even if it bends their rules. There is not sheer "other" quality about the magic or the magical beings. Another strike against Harry Potter is that its characters do not remain passive while extraordinary events unfold around them. The human characters are the instigators of the plot, and react to the stories events with more than screams of "Ia, Cthulhu ftaghn!" and mad ramblings. It is safe to conclude that Harry Potter should not be classified as cosmic horror.

Freud's Uncanny
Seeing as how it takes place in an alternate society parallel to our own, Harry Potter seems like it should be a good target for Freud's idea of unheimlich. Sadly for Freud, this is not the case, though I'm sure he will have a field day with the prolific use of wands, staves, and broomsticks. While the institutions of the wizarding world are similar to ours, they do not reverse or corrupt any important aspect of those institutions as we understand them; rather they dress them up in robes and pointy hats. A wizard house is still a home as we understand it, even if the dishes wash themselves. Thus Harry Potter does not contain elements of the uncanny.

Carroll's Art-horror
Harry Potter does contain some elements of art-horror, though I believe it would be incorrect to classify the work itself as one of art-horror, for the incitement of art-horror is not the chief aim of the story. Even within the fantastic world of wizards, where the rules of modern science can be bent, certain creatures can still produce interstitial and other types of impurity. Inferi(zombies) are still terrifying to wizards. They are capable of existing, yes; but they still combine the ideas of life and death, and as such are interstitial beings, which are considered impossibly by the muggle audience, if not the characters. Similarly, werewolves, while regarded as possible, still combine man and animal in ways they should not be combined. The wizard world is close enough to our world that impossible monsters still retain their powers of fear and disgust in both worlds, thus evoking the emotion of art-horror.

I'll try to get my review/analysis of Equinox up by Sunday night.