Question about Bart


Can someone please explain to me how Bart became so hateful and annoying so quickly? I understand he was bullied but he seemed to like his family. One meeting w/Corrine and reading of the journal, and he was gone. Haha!

I assume this is better explained in the book, which I did not read, but it was executed properly - IMO - in this movie.

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Bart was always a skinny, clumsy, awkward kid who was jealous of his big brother's grace and beauty. He felt he could never measure up. He was alone, didn't make friends easily and wanted to be loved. He was always getting into accidents, breaking things, hurting himself, although it is explained that his nerve endings didn't reach his skin, so he didn't feel pain like other people. They would spank him and it didn't work cause he didn't feel it. He was basically the black sheep of the family. Even the dog avoided him because he would step on it's tail, most likely by accident, but still, the dog didn't like him much after that.

To make things worse, his mother adopts a beautiful blonde toddler that everyone adores and fusses over, and he feels even less loved.

He loved sweets and candy and could get it easily from his grandmother's house. She would hold him and rock him and spoil him like a baby and he liked it because he wasn't getting that from home.

He was given Malcolm's diary, got under the influence of John Amos and his religious fanaticism and it went from there. He found out that Cathy and Chris were brother and sister and he was disgusted with the whole thing. I mean, who wouldn't be? The killing of the dogs was done by John Amos, although the family suspected it was Bart who did it. John put it into his head that they all needed to be punished for their evil He wanted to use an impressionable 9 year old kid to be his scape goat. His plan all along was to have Bart appear insane so that when he killed Corrine and Cathy, everyone would think it was Bart.

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Thanks! I don't think the movie portrayed this very well. He seemed like a normal, awkward pre-teen and then he just went psycho! Haha! I felt it came out of nowhere. I'm sure the book went into more detail, etc.

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I haven't read the books, but the kid of who played Bart really creeped me out. I guess that means he did a good job performance wise. The one issue I had with this film is I felt like they focused too much on Bart. I wanted to see more of Cathy and Chris.

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The book is from the kid's point of view, so they were following the book

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Totally! He looked like any of those kids who have played Damien in those Omen movies, but small and with a large pointy nose. He didn't look like the rest of the family. And he was conceived as part of Cathy's plot to ruin her mother, so he was always unwanted. Still, he was a creepy little troll.

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As I recall in the book he visited a lot with his grandmother and she slowly turned him against his parents.

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In the book he is treated less by Cathy, she feels guilt and his not as loving towards him, h senses this. Also even though it was obvious he was starved from attention, his slutty bitch of a mother decides to adopt a child he obviously hates.

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