Flowers in the Attic

As Lifetime premieres a new addition to V.C. Andrews' Dollanganger Saga, we offer a crash course on what's led us all to this. Everyone has that book, ...

Cindy, now a teenage sexpot, fights with Bart until they realize it’s because they’re in love (but, as Cindy brightly observes, “It’s not like we’re blood sibs, like Mom and Dad!”), and Bart nearly succumbs to Malcolm-induced madness until…he doesn’t. The saga ends with an Andrews-classic ending: Jory heads off into the sunset with his twins and their nanny, Bart and Cindy marry and become televangelists (I’m not lying), and, following Chris’ death in a car accident, Cathy wanders up to the attic of the new Foxworth Hall and dies. Bart is already the outsider of the family, but this is amplified when the house next door is bought by a mysterious widow, who turns out to be Corrine (Heather Graham in a grey wig), come to try and win over her grandsons. Said family, Cathy and Chris (a returning Carpani and Lewis), Jory (Anthony Konechny), his pregnant wife Melodie (Leah Gibson), and Cindy ( Samantha Hanratty of Yellowjackets) arrive, and trouble ensues. Bart doesn’t inherit the money, a ballet accident paralyzes Jory, and a despondent Melodie has an affair with Bart until her babies are born, and then splits. It seems like the most logical thing in the world that Lifetime would be the network to finally buckle down and adapt these books into movies (theatrically-released versions of Flowers in the Attic (1987) and Rain (2006) only cover the first books in their respective series), beginning with her most famous series, the Dollanganger Saga. The last movie in this particular series aired in 2015, but Lifetime revitalizes it this week with the release of Flowers in the Attic: The Origin, based on the final Dollanganger book, Garden of Shadows. What’s that you say, you’d like to watch this new movie, but are hazy on the first four? Cathy’s sons, particularly her younger son Bart (yes, the son of her mother’s husband) are the focus of the third movie, 2015’s If There Be Thorns. Does anyone want a story from Bart’s (and his older brother Jory’s) point of view? Though watered down for television, Cathy’s revenge plans unfurl in 2014’s Petals on the Wind. Set ten or so years after the first film, Cathy ( Rose McIver), Christopher (Wyatt Nash), and Carrie (Bailey Buntain) are now young adults, having been adopted post-escape by a doctor named Paul Sheffield (the story opens at his funeral, writing an incredibly problematic book character out of the movie). Chris has a doomed romance with a local girl, Cathy moves to New York City with ballet bad-boy Julian Marquet, and Carrie commits suicide after being rejected by their now-local and still-awful mother Corrine (Heather Graham). In revenge, Cathy seduces Corrine’s husband Bart, shows up to their annual Christmas party dressed like her mother to list Corrine’s sins for the guests, and causes Corrine to have a breakdown, setting Foxworth Hall on fire. Corrine shleps her children down to the Foxworth Hall, the family estate, where her father, Malcolm, is dying, and her mother, Olivia ( Ellen Burstyn), agrees to hide the kids until Corrine can worm her way back into her father’s good graces. After the death of their father, plucky teen Cathy Dollanganger ( Kiernan Shipka), her older brother Christopher, and younger twin siblings Cory and Carrie (this is all true) learn that their mother Corrine ( Heather Graham) isn’t an orphan, but was instead disowned by her wealthy parents when she eloped with her father’s much younger half-brother. For me, that book was V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic. Gifted an older cousin’s shelf of books when I was 11 years old, I found myself in possession of several entire series of Andrews’ work (a note: V.C. Andrews died in 1986, and the books subsequently written under her name are by ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman), which I promptly devoured. I realized it was something I could do and I gave it a whirl. As a child brought up on fantasy and historical fiction, I thought I knew about drama, but I was wrong.