This one smells like mothballs, Chanel No. 5, and repression. Shot through gauze and soaked in fake Virginia Gothic, Flowers in the Attic (1987) plays like a made-for-TV fever dream where incest is hinted at like a dirty joke someone wrote on the bathroom wall and hastily scrubbed off before the church bake sale. It's all pale faces, dead husbands, poison cookies, and stairs that creak like they’re tired of holding up this house of lies.
The story: Four blonde porcelain children get stashed in the attic by their trembling, tragic mother after Daddy dies in a convertible accident that might as well have been directed by Douglas Sirk on cold medication. Grandma — a cold-blooded religious tyrant in orthopedic heels — rules the house with an iron cross and a cookie tin full of arsenic. Mom says it’ll only be a few days. Months pass. Years. Hair grows longer. Shadows get darker. And the attic gets smaller every hour.
The whole thing moves like a dream you only half remember, but it sticks with you. Not because it's scary, exactly — though the tarantula and the mouse funeral and the dead kid in the tiny box sure help — but because it’s soaked in that overripe sense of wrongness. The kind you only get from stories that wear white gloves to hide the blood underneath.
This isn’t horror in the sharp-teeth, chase-scene, chainsaw sense. It’s horror with a powdered face and something terrible locked behind a brocade curtain. It’s the kind of movie where nothing really happens, and yet everything hurts. The kind of flick where you keep waiting for someone to scream, and instead they just cry quietly in a sunbeam.
And yes, it’s sanitized. Sanded down. The hard edges from the original story — the controversial ones that made certain paperback copies get passed around like contraband in middle school — are trimmed neatly away. No attic sex. No rotting corpses. Just enough suggestion to make you squirm if you already know what’s supposed to be there. This film plays like it wants to warn you about sin but still get invited to Sunday brunch.
Still, for a certain kind of kid, this was the haunted house where your imagination moved in. If you were raised on dusty bookshelves and latchkey afternoons, you knew these children. You read about them in books with covers full of pale girls and brooding houses. You stayed up late with them, flashlight under the sheets, flipping pages faster than you could process the generational trauma inside. These weren’t just stories. They were scars in mass-market paperback form. Tattered. Cheap. Unshakable.
And this movie, with all its flaws, felt like an illicit glimpse into that cracked fairytale world. Like a faded photograph of a nightmare you had once, tucked into the back of your childhood scrapbook. You knew it wasn’t quite right. But you watched it anyway.
Because somewhere in that attic — beneath the dust and lace, between the locked trunks and poisoned pastries — was a reflection of the weird, twisted, taboo curiosity that bloomed quietly inside so many of us in the early ’90s. A morbid little flower fed on secondhand trauma, parental neglect, and the sacred pulp of paperback shelves at your aunt’s house.
This wasn’t just a movie. It was a rite of passage.
One star for quality. Five stars for atmosphere. Eternal rating: Burned into your psyche like sunlight on old wallpaper.
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