“Harry Potter is dead! Eh-heh-heh!”
Look. Voldemort is a sensational character. Maybe the single most entertaining in the entire Harry Potter film franchise. I know he is also the most inherently evil, the biggest villain, and arguably the most unpleasant to look at other than Harry Potter himself, with his £5 haircut, constant excessive blinking and his mopey, mopey little face.
But played by the wonderful Ralph Fiennes (pronounced “Rafe” and “Fines” by the way lads, stop embarrassing yourself on dates when you’re trying to give her all your best Potter chat and still calling him Ralph), he has some truly wonderful moments.
Moments like this, when he believes he has killed his young adversary once and for all, and lets out the most iconic laugh of all time.
EH-HEH-HEH!
Now say it again with me. Say it like you really mean it.
EH-HEH-HEH!
I mean what is that? Other than the greatest piece of acting of all time, what is that? He sounds like he’s either coughing up a bit of biscuit or he’s having a mild stroke.
Anyway, that’s my favourite part of all the films. Those three seconds when Lord Voldemort, the baddest motherfucker in the wizarding world, sounds like a small child laughing at a cartoon when in fact he is laughing at someone dying.
Perhaps more significant though, definitely more important, is a moment contained in a brief close-up that occurs during Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, as pointed out by Reddit User PumpActionBronson.
The shot shows seven stones meticulously placed on Tom Riddle’s windowsill, representing the seven horcruxes that he is planning to split his soul into (six horcruxes and then his physical body).
As another user points out, much of the subplot of book six (Half-Blood Prince) revolves around Dumbledore’s desire to check this exact detail – how many horcruxes Voldemort wanted to create – by sending Harry Potter to extract a memory from Professor Slughorn when Tom Riddle was a student at Hogwarts himself.
As the film still shows through a subtle bit of foreshadowing, the hidden clue was in the stones all along, which only appear on screen for a couple of seconds.
There you have it. Eh-heh-heh!
