10 Great Harry Potter Characters That We Never Got To See On Screen

Much of the Half-Blood Prince centres around exposition into how Voldemort came to be. This mostly takes the form of Harry and Dumbledore viewing the memories of individuals through the latter's Pensieve, including the aforementioned Hokey.

Most of these memories explore the maternal family of the man officially known as Tom Riddle - his grandfather, the penniless and extremely bigoted Marvolo Gaunt, his son Morfin, cut from the same cloth, and his daughter Merope, towards whom he and his son are physically and mentally abusive given her lack of magical prowess.

It is somewhat haunting to see Merope's twisted fantasy of life with local Muggle Tom Riddle Sr. brought to life through the use of a love potion. Terrifying, meanwhile, is Morfin's encounter with the young Voldemort when he begins exploring his ancestry (the Gaunt's being descendents of Salazar Slytherin), an encounter that results in the murders of his paternal family and the alteration of his uncle's memory to frame him as the perpetrator.

The film adaptation streamlined the slow build revelations in favour of just two flashbacks, one showing Dumbledore's first encounter with a pre-teen Riddle in a muggle orphanage, one showing the teenage Voldemort-in-waiting attempting to learn about Horcruxes from Horace Slughorn.

Given that it found time to add scenes not in the book (such as an attack on The Burrow), you'd think a few more minutes could've been found to showcase more of the backstory of the series' antagonist.