Andrews (born Cleo Virginia Andrews) died of breast cancer in 1986 – having completed only eight of the numerous novels bearing her name – her legacy continues thanks to ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman ( The Devil’s Advocate). Andrews awakened a taste for shocking and illicit content and confirmed that telling a teenage girl she’s too young for something is the quickest way to get her undivided attention.Īlthough Virginia C. Enticing us from the shelves with haunted faces peering out through the keyhole (or “stepback”) covers, opening to ominous illustrations of the characters we’d soon meet on the pages. Her books were like Harlequin for teenage girls, passed down discreetly from older sisters or friends at school with whispers of the forbidden deeds inside. Andrews had a talent for weaving familiar fairy tale tropes of evil witches and damsels in distress into her gothic horrors, conjuring terrifying glimpses into the darkest sides of humanity. Andrews made me feel mature and sophisticated – feelings a girl of that age covets with every fiber of her being. Hiding it under the bed like porn, I’d read it in secret late at night, absorbed in the unsettling yet thrilling tale of children in peril, negligent mothers, tyrannical grandparents, and, most taboo of all: consensual incest. I couldn’t have been much older than twelve when I borrowed Flowers in the Attic from my older sister. “We were another of the unpleasant subjects that people don’t like to talk about, like mice in the attic.” In the process, I hope to unveil how these two vastly different mediums work together to tell the same story, from cover to credits. In this column, I’ll be checking out old and new adaptations to further explore both sides of that experience. As a lifelong bookworm and cinephile, I've discovered that whether I read the book before or after seeing the movie can have a profound influence on my enjoyment of the story across both mediums. While we've all uttered some version of this sentiment at one point or another, there have been those rare occasions when the opposite is true.

'Don't judge a book by its movie' is another common jab. 'The book was better' is a phrase heard often in conversations about book-to-film adaptations.

Flowers in the attic series movie