During a recent discussion with friends about the name of a book shop in our city and how we find it unwieldy and off-putting, one person in the group stated that if he ever opened a bookstore, he would call it “Flowers in the Attic.” I asked if he knew what Flowers in the Attic was about, and he admitted that he didn’t; he just liked the poetry of the phrase. To demonstrate why this would be, at best, a bad name for his future hypothetical business, I suggested that we watch the novel’s 1987 film adaptation, which (naturally) happened to be streaming on Tubi. [For those interested, the 2014 Lifetime adaptation of the novel is also on Tubi, but the service doesn’t seem to house the channel’s further adaptations of the three sequel novels for some reason.]

Cathy Dollanganger (Kristy Swanson) has the perfect life. The second eldest of the Dollanganger kids, a couple of years younger than older brother Christopher Jr. (Jeb Stuart Adams) and a half decade older than twins Cory and Carrie, she is doted upon most by her beloved father, Christopher Sr., a fact that her mother Corrine (Victoria Tennant) takes note of. On his thirty-sixth birthday, Chris Sr. dies in a car accident, and as the family’s savings dwindle and they lose their home, Corrine packs the family up and takes them to the home of her parents, known in this film only as “the grandmother” and “the grandfather.” Grandmother (Louise Fletcher) is a harsh and cruel woman who wastes no time laying down the house rules and her interpretation of religious doctrines, which are, to her, one and the same. Some of them are reasonable, like ensuring that the boys share one bed while the girls share the other, while others, like that the children are to be silent at all times, are more authoritarian. Corrine explains to her children that Grandfather is very old, and Corinne must keep the kids’ existence hidden from them until she “wins back [her] father’s love,” and that once she has, he’ll recant his previous disinheriting of her and the family will once again be financially secure. 

Of course, the most famous thing about Flowers in the Attic is that it’s a novel that deals with the taboo subject of incest. Notably, Cathy and the others have to be kept secret from Grandfather because they are the product of an incestuous relationship between their Corinne and Chris Sr. (Later books would overcomplicate this genealogy but Chris Sr. is stated to be the much younger half-brother of the Grandfather, making him Corinne’s half uncle.) This is also the stated reason that Grandmother is so monstrous to her own grandchildren, as she considers them abominations, despite their innocence. The 1979 novel on which the film was based, written by author V.C. Andrews, was derided upon publication for being utterly deranged but nonetheless proved to be shockingly popular, enough to warrant a few sequels during her lifetime (and some after that, but we won’t get into it). I read it years before I was even aware that there had been a film adaptation, and with that in mind, although this movie is difficult to defend from an objective standpoint, it’s the best way to enjoy this story with as little disgust as possible. Although the previous generation’s incest is kept intact as the inciting reason for the Dollanganger kids to be locked away in the attic, the film cuts out the relationship that develops between Cathy and Chris as the two enter puberty in complete isolation, which could be argued to both undercut the darkness of the narrative and make the more “young adult novel” elements of the original story blossom, no pun intended. It’s ultimately more toothless, but also more palatable. 

Flowers in the Attic is by no means a good movie, but it’s one that I can’t help but watch any time I’m presented the opportunity. Fletcher isn’t asked to do much here but retread the same beats that netted her Oscar win for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the film is wise to keep her out of frame with the child actors, who are universally dreadful. Swanson went on to have something of a career, albeit a brief one, but Adams appears to have mostly disappeared following Flowers, and the film world did not mourn his absence. He’s stilted, wooden, and clearly far too adult to convincingly portray a teenaged boy capable of being overpowered by Grandmother. Tennant’s portrayal is a mixed bag, as I think she subtly underplays Corinne’s financial panic and understandable horror at returning to Foxworth Hall but goes too broad later. I could almost buy that she is resentful of what she perceives as a lack of gratitude for her sacrifice on the part of her children, the film makes no time for her to have a meaningful aside glance, deep in troubled thought, as she reaps the benefits of her family wealth while her children grow emaciated and pale from lack of sunlight and exercise. There’s no evolution from the Corinne who genuinely loves her children but can’t provide for them and thus must accept a literal whipping from her parents in order to return home to the Corinne who coldly tells the remaining children that Cory has died in the hospital. It’s really on Fletcher to carry the whole thing, performance-wise, and she manages to make it work despite a role that she probably could have sleepwalked through. 

I’ve never been able to put my finger on why this film has had such staying power in my mind, and it might simply be that this is a weird tonal and narrative mish-mash. Wikipedia suggests that it could be considered part of the psycho-biddy genre, but the story mostly involves juvenile fiction elements in the form of its fantasy about adolescent self-sufficiency and competence as Chris and Cathy come to act as surrogate parents to the younger two. The novel is often considered to be a gothic text, which is fascinating to me as it clearly does align with the kinds of plots one would find in most European (specifically English) gothic stories—the old dark house, the unwanted relatives in the attic, subordinated passions, etc.—but Andrews was an American writer. American gothic lit usually eschews those elements, trading castles for caves and replacing the metaphorical representations of the horrors of the old world with the existential terror of the “wilderness” of the Western Hemisphere. Andrews’s novel, for better or worse, is probably the primary example of an American writer, specifically a Southern American writer, crafting a European style gothic story set in the American south. The first time I saw this film was when I was in grad school, broadcast over a local New Orleans affiliate that I could pick up with my rabbit ear antenna, and I was deep in the study of American gothic literature at the time—as my intended capstone thesis was originally going to be about the influence of Calvinism on the gothic traditions of the U.S.—so that’s probably why it got so solidly lodged in my mind. 

What’s fascinating about Andrews’s work is the fact that, deranged though the material itself may be, the author had a very distinct prose style. This was a trashy but popular novel that was adapted into a trashy and mostly forgotten movie, but when one thinks about contemporary literary output that would fall under the same subgenre now, the difference in actual literary quality is staggering. For all of its many, many faults, Flowers in the Attic isn’t slop. I say this as someone who is in the process of editing one of his own novel manuscripts right now, and I’ll freely admit that my own prose is not as good as Andrews’s. That carries over into the film adaptation as well. This is clearly a very cheaply made film ($3.5M) that spent most of its money on sets and (one hopes) Louise Fletcher, but even for mass-produced schlock of the late eighties, it still functions on a higher technical level than some theatrical releases I’ve seen in recent years, and it’s also fully committed to its bizarrely melodramatic tone. The periodic slow-motion shots of Grandmother unveiling the leather whip as she prepares to beat her daughter while Grandfather watches or her brushing Cathy’s treasured ballerina music box to the floor to shatter into dozens of pieces manage to somehow be both campy and utterly sincere, which is probably why it’s gone on to be a cult classic. That it never deviates from that tone even when Swanson is wearing perhaps the worst wig in the history of cinema is a testament to its staying power. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond