- Let him go. He, he's not a criminal.
- Ma'am, we have to take him back to foster care.
- Please just un uncuff him.
- Get her inside.
- Eugenia, please they're just doing their job.
- Forget it. I'll be 18 in a couple months.
I'll come back for you. Okay?
- One of the reasons why the V.C. Andrews books and movies
are so popular is because everybody can relate.
Whether it's the fact that there is mental illness
in their family or poverty
or that there is some kind of abuse in their family.
Nobody gets out of this life with a family unscathed.
So it is a melodramatic version of everybody's existence.
- Audrina!
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Dark Family Secrets drive the drama
of all V.C. Andrews' novels and film adaptations.
- I'm not feeling very well today.
Maybe you should go and talk with your father instead.
- Which father, your husband, or my real father?
- [Narrator] Not surprisingly,
the enigmatic author drew inspiration from her own life.
- V.C. Andrews had a terrible accident at school
where she fell down a series of staircases
and injured her back very badly.
She was bound to a wheelchair
and she lived with her mother for her whole life.
And her sort of obsession with fairy tales,
coupled with the fact that she was sort of a prisoner
of her own body, and in a lot of ways prisoner
of her own family created this strange style
of the story she wrote.
She was writing hyper versions of her life.
- V.C. Andrews was fascinated with why people
who love each other, hurt each other.
She doesn't love us.
- I don't care.
I don't want her love.
I want her to hurt the way that she hurt us.
- Family, injuring family
when there should be so protective.
Who will you go to when you're in trouble?
If you can't go to your mother, you can't go to your father,
you have to go to strangers.
That's really hard.
- The real reason Luke Casteel
has hated you your whole life is,
because he's not your father.
I am.
- One thing that's pretty typical in the world
of V.C. Andrews is I would never be too confident
that you know who your actual mother and father are.
V.C. Andrews stories tend to be sagas
that follow families over the course of generations
with a lot of twists and turns and secrets
that become apparent as the years go by.
Terrible things that happen
that get covered up over the years,
eventually rear their ugly head in some way.
- I don't know what's going on here
but I'm telling you, it's a mistake.
- Dawn, you're father.
He's under arrest for kidnapping.
Your parents kidnapped you.
- [Narrator] In the V.C. Andrews universe
the stern and mysterious matriarchs and patriarchs
are often the keeper of those secrets.
This is especially the case with
the "Flowers in the Attic"
and "Dawn Cutler," series of novels and films.
- There are some obvious similarities
between the Foxworth and the Cutlers.
Powerful grandfathers, powerful grandmothers
whose job it is to sort of protect the family name
and hide the family secrets.
Women who seem mean, but are hiding ways
that they themselves have been abused and mistreated.
But I would say both grandmothers
have become thick-skinned
because of what they've suffered.
(Olivia groaning)
- We'll be having this for dinner
and I need a horse.
Not to kill to ride.
- So, when we first meet Olivia Foxworth,
she is a bright, energetic, loving young woman.
We see that she had a loving father
and she is full of optimism when she gets married
and moves to Foxworth Hall.
- It's so very dark.
- You'll get used to it.
- And we kind of quickly find out
that it was not the place she thought it would be.
There are secrets there,
and her husband isn't just the least supportive husband
a woman could actually wind up with.
- Who gave you permission to come in here.
- Oh, it's you.
- Get out.
- Her life hasn't turned out as she would hope
and she devotes a lot of her energy
to defending her children.
And we see that's only successful to a certain extent
because these secrets and that abuse
can't really be covered up.
And eventually the curse of the family continues.
(banging)
- You have destroyed this family.
- No.
- You're dealing with families
that have a very different public persona
than their private lives.
So, the secrets are all keeping the parts of their lives
that they don't want public.
In the case of the "Dawn" series,
Dawn is the embodiment of Lillian's biggest secret.
So she has to be kept away and managed
and in "Flowers in the Attic."
Olivia has to keep away Corrine's children
because they are, again, the embodiment
of all of the dirty secrets of that family.
- No.
- [Merideth] There is rape and incest, and their secrets
are as dark and twisted as any family secret could be.
(intense music)
- I think more than ever, we're right
in the perfect time for this
because people are so interested in their backgrounds.
There are all these apps and sites
where you can find out with your DNA who you're related to,
where your grandparents came from.
There's so many family secrets,
and I think learning secrets about your neighbor
is not as intense as learning secrets about yourself.
(dramatic music)