Riddle in the Dark: Regarding the Chamber of Secrets
I remember the second Harry Potter novel maybe leaned into the more macabre and sinister elements that its setting provided more than any other installment. This is a school where it's basically Halloween all year round and the students get to literally party with ghosts and other things that traditionally go bump in the night. And if the majority of Harry Potter novels have an air of mystery to them, The Chamber of Secrets is paced like a whodunnit with the characters getting picked off one-by-one as the core trio scramble to find the culprit in a plot that conveniently doesn't near fruition until the end of the school year.
As someone that grew up reading Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle with a childhood foundation of horror movies, this all was a perfectly blended literary cocktail. Outside of Dobby, Chamber of Secrets is a complete improvement over its predecessor at least in terms of the novel. Something is stalking through the halls of the school petrifying characters (This is still a pre-Goblet of Fire world so even though death is celebrated in the second novel with things like that Death Day party, it hasn't yet come here to stay) and it provides Harry simultaneously with his Saint George and King Arthur moment as he draws Godric Gryffindor's sword to slay the dragon/basilisk.
True to its title, a lot of comfortable truths come to the surface over the course of this story: The reason for Hagrid's expulsion, the schoolyard origins of Voldemort, the morbid history of several of the school's ghosts, even young Ginny Weasley has a couple secrets of her own. And any secret that you sit on usually roars back with extensive consequences from the attempted repression. And not even the deepest, darkest dungeon can contain them. That's a metaphor. And also literal here. But you already knew that.
Last time, I said the first Harry Potter film was arguably the worst. To elaborate on that, it's between that and this; they're both easily the weakest of the entire film series. Not necessarily the biggest revelation that they're directed by the same guy who then went on to direct the Percy Jackson movies which are even worse; effectively pastiching his own previous work. Just like The Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone sees its source material as an obligation rather than an inspiration, The Chamber of Secrets loses much in its cinematic translation.
It also has a shitload of spiders and there's nothing on this good, green Earth that unnerves me more. Yes, I know they're in the book but there's a difference on the printed page rather than celluloid.
After establishing the world and rules in its first novel, Chamber of Secrets was the first installment to really explore its own setting with a little macabre glee; it's the most Halloween-feeling entry in a franchise populated nearly exclusively by witches and wizards. But if the second story was about uncovering and facing secrets, than its successor was all about the past coming back to haunt its primary character.
As someone that grew up reading Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle with a childhood foundation of horror movies, this all was a perfectly blended literary cocktail. Outside of Dobby, Chamber of Secrets is a complete improvement over its predecessor at least in terms of the novel. Something is stalking through the halls of the school petrifying characters (This is still a pre-Goblet of Fire world so even though death is celebrated in the second novel with things like that Death Day party, it hasn't yet come here to stay) and it provides Harry simultaneously with his Saint George and King Arthur moment as he draws Godric Gryffindor's sword to slay the dragon/basilisk.
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| Looks like he's pulling teeth. |
Last time, I said the first Harry Potter film was arguably the worst. To elaborate on that, it's between that and this; they're both easily the weakest of the entire film series. Not necessarily the biggest revelation that they're directed by the same guy who then went on to direct the Percy Jackson movies which are even worse; effectively pastiching his own previous work. Just like The Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone sees its source material as an obligation rather than an inspiration, The Chamber of Secrets loses much in its cinematic translation.
It also has a shitload of spiders and there's nothing on this good, green Earth that unnerves me more. Yes, I know they're in the book but there's a difference on the printed page rather than celluloid.
After establishing the world and rules in its first novel, Chamber of Secrets was the first installment to really explore its own setting with a little macabre glee; it's the most Halloween-feeling entry in a franchise populated nearly exclusively by witches and wizards. But if the second story was about uncovering and facing secrets, than its successor was all about the past coming back to haunt its primary character.
