This Is the Scariest Scene In Harry Potter (And It’s Not Even Close)

Harry Potter may be a children’s series, but it still has some terrifying moments in its exploration of witchcraft and wizardry. The movies get progressively darker as they go along too, which means they treat their scary moments more seriously and less cartoonish. Still, the scariest scene in all eight films is in the second movie, when Harry and Ron visit the Aragog’s home all by themselves. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets shares the same director and nostalgic style as the first movie, but if you stop and think about it, its content is extremely dire.

All things considered, it’s a wonder that Hogwarts survives this onslaught at all, especially after its unlikely heroes wandered into the den of a giant spider all by themselves. Seeing all those eight-legged monsters scuttling towards Harry and Ron in a mixture of CGI and puppetry is enough to haunt a young fan for life.

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As usual, the trouble starts with Hagrid. The gamekeeper advises 12-year-old Harry and Ron to “follow the spiders” if they want to learn the truth, with no time to warn them about what they’re getting into. They follow the ominous trails of arachnids fleeing the castle into the Forbidden Forest on their own, with no one to back them up and no way to deal with what they’ll soon encounter. After a short moonlit hike, they run into Hagrid’s loyal former pet Aragog, who has managed to have hundreds of offspring.

The boys do get some important exposition from Aragog, but the scene is so tense that a viewer could be forgiven for missing the infodump altogether. Aragog is horrifying to behold by himself, let alone the endless mass of crawling legs that slowly gang up behind the boys. The movie makes the perspective very clear — most of these spiders are at least waist-high on Harry and Ron, and they can move fast. Thankfully, we never learn what would happen if they caught the boys or bit them, but we later hear about how coveted the spider’s venom is in the sixth movie.

The fear factor is enhanced by Ron, a self-confessed arachnophobe who is clearly paralyzed with fear, meaning he will be no help in the ensuing confrontation. Their saving grace doesn’t even make things much better — the Weasley family’s enchanted car comes to the rescue, but after it threw Ron and Harry out last time we saw it, it’s a wary ally at best.

In the end, it feels like Ron and Harry owe their survival of this scene mostly to luck, and ironically to Voldemort as well since, he inadvertently taught Harry an anti-spider spell in a flashback. The momentum of the plot takes them forward fast, which is also good because Ron seems ready to curl up in the fetal position after this harrowing experience.

The Other Scariest Scenes in Harry Potter

There are certainly other candidates for scariest scene in the series, and depending on the viewer there may be something that hits harder than Aragog. Realistically, if a couple of unprepared 12-year-olds could get away from the spiders, it’s safe to assume that more experienced witches and wizards could do the same. Still, after facing down a swarm of megalithic spiders that could talk, it’s hard to imagine being scared of another human — even one who could cast spells.

That being said, other monsters definitely raise the scare factor in this series, particularly the undead Inferi in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Voldemort’s snake Nagini also helps to make things creepier in any scene she appears in, and the infamous Dementors cast a long shadow in some of their scenes.

Harry Potter doesn’t set out to be a horror story, but it captures that side of magic pretty succinctly when it wants to. You can stream all eight movies now on Max, along with the Fantastic Beasts movies. The books are available now in print, digital and audiobook formats.