Lupin's Original Werewolf Transformation Was Too Scary, But Harry Potter Could Use a Dark Side
Back in the beginning, we had no way of knowing that JK Rowling was planning something no author had ever done before: adjusting her books to age up along with her audience.
The sweet, slim Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone had some scares but was suitable for the primary school students who read it.
Those same students were later served up massive, complex, adult books – but it worked, because like Harry himself the readers weren't kids any longer.
While Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets showed a few inklings that the books were becoming more sophisticated (there's definitely increased menace and horror in the tale of Tom Riddle), the maturing nature of the storytelling became really clear in The Prisoner of Azkaban.
Unlike the first two books, this wasn't a straightforward mystery with a straightforward bad guy at its center – and in the end, justice failed to exonerate Sirius Black or punish Peter Pettigrew. This time, we left Hogwarts with a sense of trepidation rather than triumph.
It was therefore fitting that the third Harry Potter movie took on a new director with a much more somber vision. Alfonso Cuarón's version of Hogwarts is decidedly less whimsical than his predecessor's.
The skies above Hogwarts are perpetually cloudy, the kids wear more down-to-earth clothing, and the tone is generally more serious. When it came to Lupin 's on-screen transformation, the werewolf appearance was originally staged with practical effects.
The version in the movie was changed using CGI, but that's not because the practical effects were bad – exactly the opposite. The studio declared the original version of Lupin's transformation was too frightening for kids.
According to David Thewlis, who played Lupin throughout the series, "Originally, I used to have blood in my cheeks that poured out of my cheeks, and I threw up."
While the final cut holds up better than most 20-year-old CGI, there's a definite B-movie feel to the scene that is unfortunate, given how excellent the adaptation is overall.
Plus, it doesn't really feel in the spirit of Harry Potter to take away the darkness and horror. In the previous movie, an innocent girl was brainwashed into helping a giant homicidal snake that terrorized her friends – and that's quaint compared to a flayed baby using your DNA to reincarnate into the person who murdered your parents.
It's too bad that Lupin's transformation wasn't allowed to be the full, scary version. Harry Potter has always had a lot of darkness at its core, but that's never stopped it from being a generation-defining story.
After all, as Dumbledore says: "Happiness can be found in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light."