Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (novel)/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Nagini the snake being INSIDE Bathilda's corpse and controlling her like a puppet, then SHEDDING her dead body like it was SNAKE SKIN. Ugh!
    • The entire Bathilda Bagshot scene is extremely creepy, beginning with the gruesomely detailed descriptions of the horrific condition of Bagshot's house and Bagshot herself, and ending with a battle against Nagini in a pitch dark room.
    • The house is described as 'smelling like rotten meat'.
    • I saw the film. On the one hand, every close up of Bathilda's face (and there are several of them) is horribly unnerving, especially if you know what's coming. On the other hand, it's much less graphic than one would imagine; it's implied that Nagini was transfigured to look like Bathilda, and that the real one was killed by the snake; Hermione finds the real Bathilda's body. We never see it, but we see flies, Hermione's horrified face, and plenty of blood splatters. Now, the actual fight with Nagini? Terrifying. Partially because the director was not afraid to put in plenty of shots where the snake was coming towards the audience. My sympathies go out to anyone who has seen that scene in 3D.
    • A giant snake who possesses people... HOLY CRAP! Nagini is OROCHIMARU!
    • The part where Hermione realizes they are being watched—especially the atmospheric horror of the film scene—is chilling.
    • Harry and Nagini are fighting in the grimy, dimly-lit upstairs bedroom of the house, and then they crash through a wall into a well-lit, clean nursery-like room. It just seems so wrong and out of place.
  • Speaking of Nagini, we can't forget Snape's brutal murder. Oh, how beautiful it must be to see his neck chewed on by Nagini, and then see him writhing on the floor in pain as blood and memories leak out from him...
    • It gets worse when it's revealed that it was totally pointless.
  • Little scarred and blistered, soulless mewling creature Voldemort, so repugnant-looking that Harry didn't want to touch it.
  • What about the Ministry rounding up Half-Bloods and Muggle-borns, even the children? And it's implied that a lot of them (yes, even kids) are given to the Dementors...
  • Fenrir Greyback's remarks about Hermione, and all of the torture scene, despite not being graphic, are very creepy too.
    • It'll get worse in the movie. We get to see Bellatrix pinning Hermione to the ground, interrogating her while Hermione screams. Doesn't sound much more creepy than the book, right? Except then Bellatrix carves the word "Mudblood" into Hermione's arm. *shiver*
      • I honestly thought that Bellatrix was biting Hermione. Even though I saw the words, I'm still convinced that she gnawed them in.
  • Umbridge keeps her government post when Voldemort takes over the country and turns it into a thinly-disguised fascist dystopia, to many readers' lack of surprise.
    • Not just keeping her government post, it seems like she becomes even more politically powerful upon Voldemort's takeover! The idea of someone like her having the power to be other people's judge and jury in a police state is pretty terrifying!
    • Don't forget the magical eye mounted on her door, which used to belong to Mad-Eye Moody.
    • Or how she likely ordered a large number of Muggle-borns to have their souls sucked out by the Dementors.
      • Which could be related to far more real and horrifying events, which can only add to the effect of the nightmare.
    • Umbridge during the interrogation of the Muggle-borns. Just remember that her Patronus-fueling happy thought is sending people to their deaths. If you read that and just thought "meh", for the love of God, stay on your own side of the internet.
      • And you know how to make it worse? She wore a freaking horcrux in her neck, a part of Voldemort's soul and she had no trouble making a Patronus, in the presence of Dementors. I didn't fully realize how sick she was until it was mentioned that Harry couldn't conjure a Patronus when it was in his neck. Not to mention it seemed she wasn't affected by the Horcrux, she is the worst.
      • Even worse, maybe she IS affected by the Horcrux, but she's already so evil that we don't notice any change.
    • Even scarier is that Umbridge was never a follower of Voldemort. She's always been loyal to the Minister of Magic, whomever that may be - unfortunately, the current Minister of Magic is under the effect of an Imperius Charm from Voldemort. Umbridge takes advantage of the situation. She already was an incorrigible sadist before Voldemort took over, after all...
        • Unlike other things in the books this was very true to life. She is the living embodiment of Voldemort's quote from the first book "There is no good or evil, only power and those too weak to seek it." Umbridge has no morals, not so long as she is at the top of the ladder.
      • Another way of putting it: adding evil to Umbridge is like pissing in a bucket of piss.
  • Here are another couple of examples from Deathly Hallows: The "Dumbledore corpse", who floats towards you saying that you killed him. Then there's Dumbledore's sister: a six year old is playing happily in her garden, exploring her magic powers. Then a group of older boys appear. They do... something... to her, which causes her to suppress her magical powers and drives her insane. Finally, there's the fate of Voldemort. He ends up as a shrunken, slimy thing trapped in the gateway between life and death, and he's stuck there forever and nobody will ever help him. Yeeeesh.
    • Not that nobody WILL help him; nobody CAN help him. Dumbledore doesn't say, "We must do nothing for him," or, "We should do nothing for him," or, "We may do nothing for him." He says, "We CAN do nothing for him." Rowling uses language very carefully. Riddle has made his bed, and he must lie in it.
  • Voldemort kills the wandmaker Gregorovitch, described as having a similar appearance to Father Christmas. Voldemort murdered Father Christmas.
    • Voldemort arrives at a Muggle house looking for Gregorovitch. The way it's described with the happy mother opening the door, her laughing children in the background, then seeing him and begging for her life and trying to protect her children... he kills an entire family just because he went to the wrong damn house!
  • Voldemort pursuing the heroes in mid air without a broom, flying like a bat out of hell.
  • The scene where the trio are visiting Luna's house and go into her room... and realize that she hasn't been there for quite some time. It's worse when Harry begins to calmly punch holes through her dad's excuses. Something is terribly wrong here. Later, it's revealed that Luna's a-okay, but when I first read that scene, I thought that her dad had KILLED her.
    • Arguably, the real reason for her disappearing was more horrifying than what we were initially led to believe: the Death Eaters had kidnapped Luna Lovegood and held her hostage, and it is implied that the place she was held at tortures its prisoners. They also imply that they are perfectly willing to kill Luna if her father disobeys, such when they ask him to hand over Harry and his friends.
  • The prologue, when Voldemort murders the Muggle Studies teacher. That's not so bad; what's bad is what he says afterwards.

Voldemort: Dinner, Nagini.

    • Oh, no, no, it is so bad, because JKR COMPLETELY and cruelly fakes us out for a second, not revealing who the person is suspended above the table, and then having Voldemort say that "she" was a teacher from Hogwarts. It might have been McGonagall, Sprout, Trelawney, or one of the others we know well. And then it was... someone we'd never met before. Still sad, but that was mean.
    • And then there's the whole reason he targeted her to begin with: For daring to suggest that Muggles should be tolerated and peacefully coexisted with. Knowing all the poor woman wanted was peace makes watching her die, while tearfully begging for Snape's help all the more heartrending for the viewer/reader and Snape.
    • The whole implications of this scene, much like with the "MAGIC IS MIGHT" statue: Muggles aren't even considered human. They (make that WE, the readers) are lower forms of life; vermin to be devoured by snakes, or if luckier, to simply live to serve Pure Bloods (and half bloods?). Of course, this is also very reminiscent of how some members of a certain group felt/feel about another certain group.
  • As to the statue... were the people being crushed underfoot a depiction or real Muggles Taken for Granite? Or worse, put into an And I Must Scream situation?
    • Even worse if you realize that statue is quite reminiscent of a lot of Holocaust monuments, particularly this one.
  • The part near the end when Voldemort paralyzes Neville and sets him on fire. Voldemort knows hundreds of other less painful and more efficient ways to kill, but here he chooses to burn someone alive.
    • If it makes you feel any better, reread the scene. Voldemort only puts the Sorting Hat on his head and sets the hat on fire. This then invokes its own horror: the screams? It's the hat screaming!
  • What happens to Lavender: She's mauled by Greyback and he starts to feed upon her from her throat. In the books, she lives, but she dies in the film.
  • The dragon in the Gringotts underground was taught by the goblins to associate the sound of clanking metal with the pain of being stabbed with a red-hot sword. It flinches when it hears the sound. Poor thing...
  • Friendly reminder that if Voldemort won in the end, he would have most likely killed or hunted every single muggle on the planet and with only purebloods left in the world to marry and reproduce, the wizarding race would have severely degraded. That's right, if the purebloods got their way, mankind would have been headed towards its final collapse.
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