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A Magical Experience Illuminates Austin

Arts And Entertainment Features

A Magical Experience Illuminates Austin

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From November 2024 through January 19th, 2025, the Harry Potter Forbidden Forest Experience will light up the night in Austin, Texas. We at the Megaphone were asked to come and provide coverage on this experience and how it captures the feeling of the Wizarding World. 

As we walk into the Harry Potter experience we are met at the door with music, butterbeer, and marshmallows. The atmosphere resembles that of Hogsmeade, the small village often visited by Hogwarts students in the Harry Potter universe. Once through the gates of the Forbidden Forest, we were introduced to an aura and setup that welcomes all Harry Potter fans, including many children wearing cloaks of their Hogwarts houses and families with their Harry Potter franchise wands.

Photo by Zaria Renfro

The trail features music from the Harry Potter soundtrack and voice lines from the beloved characters that all fans of the Wizarding World have become obsessed with. The famous Hedwig theme plays at the beginning of the experience, helping transport the audience to the Wizarding World. We were first met with Hagrid holding a lamp alongside Fang, his boarhound dog as shown in the first movie. The music played on the trail massively impacts the experience, featuring a variety of tunes that are both eerie and familiar to fans of Harry Potter along the trail. Workers on the trail inform audiences that there’s a hippogriff, a creature from the Harry Potter universe, allowing guests to have the experience of bowing and showing respect to the mythical creature, which responds by bowing back as seen in the movies– a truly interactive experience to those on the trail!

Photo by Zaria Renfro

The trail consists of different sections of the Forbidden Forest, showing different animals and scenes straight out of the movies. One section is dedicated to the werewolves, with a sign reading “Beware of The Path, Especially on the Full Moon”, alongside sounds of howling and glowing eyes to indicate that the werewolves were hiding. The trail features different audios for each section. In a section that we walked, we could hear the scene from the fifth movie, when Hagrid tells the “golden trio” (Harry, Ron, and Hermione) that he cannot leave his half-brother. After continuing down the trail we see his half-brother, Grawp the giant, who touches the hearts of many. Further down, there is a stop where guests with wands are able to experience a duel with a setup that allows audiences to put their wands through a hole and have their own magic battle. There is also a carriage from the movie, demonstrating the commitment of detail with the “invisible” thestrals pulling the carriage.

Photo by Zaria Renfro

The different sections of the trail show the different parts of the Harry Potter movies and books, such as the section dedicated to the villainous Tom Riddle, where the audio from the second movie, The Chamber of Secrets, shows how power-hungry he was. This section features Death Eater symbols such as the mask and tattoo that are put on the arms of Death Eaters to show their alliance to Voldemort. All the markings in the trees glow to show what represents him, as well as showing the different Horcruxes he created. The last sections of the trail also include audio from the Fantastic Beasts trilogy because of the creatures that were placed in those last sections. When finishing the trail we once again see the lights on the trees to light the way of the trail and the different colors of the houses as well as familiar music from the Harry Potter soundtrack.

Photo by Zaria Renfro

The trail allows many people, not only Harry Potter fans, a taste of the Wizarding World while also allowing the Harry Potter fandom to reminisce about the books and movies that they deeply love from this universe. The amount of commitment that Warner Bros. and the people working on the Harry Potter experience have put into this trail was tremendous, transforming nature to be one with the experiences that they are giving the audiences. They are able to transfigure the trail to be one with the movies and the books along with nature itself in this park.

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