‘Well, definitely’: The director of the best entry in a flagging $9.7 billion franchise that’s being run into the ground is adamant it’s a horror movie

Only in Hollywood could a franchise that definitively ended be dusted off and prequelized, just for a reboot of the entire thing to be announced at the same time those prequels are dying a slow and painful death among critics and audiences, but such is the money-making power of Harry Potter.

Not content with destroying her own reputation and credibility through her contentious personal perspective, J.K. Rowling is more than happy to allow Warner Bros. to run her brainchild into the ground. It’s looking increasingly likely that Fantastic Beasts is over, and nobody really wants the book series to be turned into a TV series, but at least the magic of the original eight installments remains.

Arguably the pick of the bunch is Alfonso Cuarón’s Prisoner of Azkaban, as you’d expect from one of the modern era’s finest directorial talents. Taking the property in the darker direction it would stick to right until the end, the filmmaker remained adamant in an interview with Total Film when asked that he’d made a horror movie.

“Well, definitely. When I read the book, there were two elements that I liked. There was the horror film element, but also the noir aspect of it. In a way, when I was doing it, the model was more of the German cinema at the end of the silent era, and the transition into the talkies, like Fritz Lang to Murnau. You can see that some of Fritz Lang’s films are kind of noir, but, at the same time, they have kind of horror elements to them. And, more importantly, particularly with Fritz Lang, through the genre, he was trying to convey – or just to project – the anxieties of his time. I think that what J.K. Rowling did with Potter, it was a reference of our times, of human behavior.”

There’s definitely elements of horror through the presence of the supernatural Dementors and a full-fledged werewolf howling at the moon, but Prisoner Azkaban is still high fantasy at the end of the day. Of course, we’re not going to argue with somebody who’s got four Academy Awards on their shelf, so if he says he made a Harry Potter horror, then we’d have to agree.