The relationship between fantastic cinema and mythology in the context of intertextuality: The case of Harry Potter

The film industry utilizes various fields for film production. One of the most used of these fields is mythology. The supernatural elements of mythology are especially effective in the production of fantasy genre films. The structure of fantasy, which transcends the limits of logic and reality, overlaps with the narrative of myths. Thus, the fantastic genre attracts the audience with its epic visuals that it produces by utilizing the elements of mythology. Therefore, making sense of the relationship between mythology and fantasy films is the main problem of the thesis. The thesis, which was created within the scope of mythology and the fantastic genre, aims to explain the general characteristics of these two genres, their common points, the transfers of form and content between fantastic and mythological narratives, and how fantastic films make use of mythology. In line with this, the Harry Potter series of eight films was selected as a sample by purposive sampling method from the universe of fantasy genre films released after 2000. The Harry Potter fantasy genre series, which has not lost its popularity since it was first published as a novel, is still being continued in the form of transmedia storytelling. Therefore, it was deemed worthy to be selected as a sample. At the same time, since the series is largely produced with mythological references, it is one of the most transferred texts from mythology to fantasy. The intertextuality approach was used to analyze these transfers from oral tradition and written form to visual text. With this approach, the intertextual relationship between myth and cinema and how intertextual transfer from mythological sources was made in the creation of the Harry Potter series as an example of the fantasy genre were discussed. Then, it is analyzed how Joseph Campbell's monomyth theory, which explains the journey of the mythological hero, is adapted to the Harry Potter narrative, which provides a better understanding of myths, narrative and plot. As a result, it has been seen that fantasy films, led by the Harry Potter series, are the greatest means of concretizing and transforming the myths, which are transmitted through oral tradition and come to life in the imagination of primitive people and have an abstract form, into a contemporary narrative. The Harry Potter series, created according to the monomyth stages, transformed mythological stories by reconstructing them through intertextual methods within the framework of its own technical possibilities. In doing so, it mostly utilized the technique of pastiche which refers to the creation of a new text by utilizing an existing text, direct quotations and allusions.