Harry Potter

The Shrieking Shack & Whomping Willow

Two of Prisoner of Azkaban's best locations in one crooked, leaning little package.

Brick Rated Score

4.0/5

Set 76407 · 2022

Pieces773

Minifigs6

Year2022

Set number76407

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The verdict

This one surprised me, and I don't say that about many licensed sets.

The Shrieking Shack leans and sags exactly the way a haunted house should, the Whomping Willow actually swats minifigures across the room, and the Marauders lineup is one of the best minifig rosters LEGO has ever put in a mid-size box. It is not flawless (the stickers are heavy and the walls get wobbly up top), but for the Prisoner of Azkaban fan this is an easy yes.

Best for: Prisoner of Azkaban fans who want the Marauders on a shelf without spending UCS money

The full review

What it is

The Shrieking Shack is one of those film locations that only works if it looks wrong, and that is exactly what got me here. LEGO built the whole shack on purpose-crooked angles, with offset bricks, mismatched browns and greys, and slopes that make the roofline sag like the place is about to give up. Sitting next to it is the Whomping Willow, and the two together recreate the tunnel-and-tree drama of Prisoner of Azkaban better than a 773-piece set has any right to. Turn the knob at the base of the tree and the whole canopy spins while the branches bend in to snatch a minifigure and hurl it. I grinned the first time I did it, and I grinned the tenth time too.

The catch

I'll be straight with you about where it stumbles. The stickers are everywhere, and on a set with this much wood texture and this many little wall panels, applying them cleanly is a patience test. The shack also fights you a bit structurally: as the walls climb and lean outward the way the design wants, the build gets fragile, and more than one person has popped a chunk of wall loose while pressing a window into place. And then there is Snape. This is the scene where Snape barges into the Shrieking Shack, and leaving him out of a set at this price point is a genuine miss that a lot of longtime fans have not forgiven.

Who it's for

If you love Prisoner of Azkaban, or you have been chasing a Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew for your Harry Potter shelf, buy this without overthinking it. The minifig value alone carries a big share of the box, and the play functions make it a real toy rather than a static display. I would steer you elsewhere only if you are strictly a display builder who hates stickers, or if rock-solid architecture matters more to you than atmosphere. For everyone else this is a warm, characterful set that punches above its piece count.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

Building this is a study in controlled messiness. Rather than clean brick-on-brick walls, you are offsetting elements, mixing three or four shades of brown and grey, and layering slopes and textured tiles so the shack reads as rotten and abandoned. It is a fun, loose kind of building that rewards you visually, though the trade-off is that the structure never feels truly locked in, and the upper walls stay a little precarious right to the end. The Whomping Willow is the mechanical heart: a knob-driven turntable and bendable branch assembly that genuinely works, which is the piece of engineering people remember most.

The headline parts here are the minifigures. You get Harry, Hermione and Ron alongside Sirius Black, Peter Pettigrew and Remus Lupin, and several of those figures are exclusive to this set, which is why the roster holds so much of the value. Lupin has the best trick, a transformation into a werewolf as the moonlight play feature kicks in, and that molded werewolf is the standout non-standard piece in the box. The rest of the parts skew toward earthy browns, tan textured elements and leaf pieces for the willow, so it is a useful haul if you build spooky or woodland MOCs, even if there are no jaw-dropping new molds beyond the beast.

Fun facts

01The set retired in December 2024 after launching on June 1, 2022 at an RRP of $89.99, and sealed copies have since climbed to roughly 86% above retail.
02The Whomping Willow's canopy spins and its branches bend to grab and throw minifigures, all driven by a single knob at the base of the tree.
03Professor Lupin transforms into a molded werewolf as part of the set's moonlight play feature, one of the few werewolf figures in the Harry Potter LEGO line.
04Fans widely flagged the absence of Severus Snape, who is central to the actual Shrieking Shack scene, as the set's biggest missed opportunity.