They screwed up Macaulay Culkin and now they're coming for the rest of our young. Ever since the 2002 American remake of The Ring sparked a resurgence in the 'creepy kids' horror subgenre, Hollywood has been unrelenting in its hostility towards the apparently cherubic boys and girls who adorn its silver screen. This week, US box office sensation Mama furthers the cause of universally available birth control with a duo of demonic youngsters that make Will Smith's progeny look positively cuddly. When the film's twin terrors aren't humming nursery rhymes in cold, emotionless tones or appearing suddenly from behind doorways with looks of quiet evil smeared across their faces, you'll find them drawing scratchy pictures of murder, mutilation and torture. Between them, the girl from The Others and Haley Joel Osment, Crayola's 'blood and gore' range must be flying off the shelves.

Stark shading and bold tones by Insidious's Dalton (age 10). Photograph: Charlie Lyne

It was 1956, amidst growing fears that America's youth might soon rise up and follow James Dean to an angst-fuelled early grave, when the archetype of the creepy kid first took hold. Shrieky melodrama The Bad Seed featured a pint-sized, pigtailed killer who delighted in tormenting her hapless, complacent parents. Variations on the theme recurred throughout the next two decades, in films like Village of the Damned (main picture), Children of the Damned and Children of the Corn that were as thematically provocative as they were syntactically pedestrian. By the time the 1976 exploitation flick Who Can Kill A Child? hit the screen, its titular question seemed rhetorical —who wouldn't kill a child the way things were going?

As with all children, puberty proved a problem. Cinema's bad seeds blossomed into malevolent plants, but failed to inspire the terror they invoked as pre-schoolers. The Exorcist's expletive-spouting, vomit-spewing 12-year-old Regan MacNeil seemed considerably less terrifying when she reappeared as an angsty teenager four years later in Exorcist II: The Heretic, while the appointment of a fully-grown Damien Thorn to the post of U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain in Omen III: The Final Conflict did little to evoke the menace of his infant counterpart.

Nowadays, genre-savvy audiences need barely a glimpse of sweet, innocent Timmy before they've marked him down as a blood-thirsty maniac. This has prompted filmmakers to exploit other, as-yet-uncompromised symbols of innocence for horrific effect. In 2011, Insidious signposted evil with nothing more ominous than a baby monitor.

No prophylactic in the world can keep Hollywood from bringing yet more creepy kids onto our screens, but with so much evidence now available to warn would-be parents of the demonic potential of childrearing, it's hard to understand why any rational mind would willingly bring such a curse into the world. Perhaps that's why Mama, like other recent genre entries Case 39 and Orphan, centres around an adoption. If the next generation has to be satanic, then we might as well share the burden.