The fourth installment of the Harry Potter series brings a shift in the tone of the beloved boy wizard’s adventures. In the first three novels, Harry went toe-to-toe with Dark wizards and ferocious beasts, but as expected, Harry always escaped relatively unscathed and lived to spend another year at Hogwarts. In The Goblet of Fire, however, Harry finds himself faced with the most horrifying scene he has witnessed thus far: the death of a fellow Hogwarts student, killed in cold blood by another person. Rowling uses Cedric’s death and the Unforgivable Curses to illustrate the death of innocence and the type of trauma that can permanently alter a child’s perception of the world around them.

When Professor Moody teaches the class about the Unforgivable Curses at the beginning of the year, he explains that the Ministry of Magic thinks it is inappropriate to show these spells to students during their fourth year. However, he stresses that the students need to know “what [they’re] up against” (87). Wildly different from the Defense Against the Dark Arts professors who have come before him, Moody teaches the students that the world is scary, chaotic, and evil instead of shying away from the horrors that await the fourth-year students.