Child star superbly evil in well-made horror film

Are demon children making a comeback at the movies?

They were all the rage post-1960s: “The Exorcist,” “The Omen” and “The Other” were nothing if not allegories for a generation of youth gone wild.

The genre then faded during subsequent decades but seems to be burbling up again with recent movies such as “Hereditary,” “The Witch” and the new release “The Prodigy.”

As always in such stories, a supernatural force takes over a child, but there’s also a growing sense that the parents might share in the blame.

In “The Prodigy,” Taylor Schilling (“Orange Is the New Black”) plays Sarah Blume, a quintessential modern mom: young, pretty, once hip but now living in the quiet suburbs of Philadelphia with her fashionably bearded husband, John (Peter Mooney), and their only son, Miles (Jackson Robert Scott).

Miles is an unusual kid, with one brown eye and one blue (“like David Bowie,” says an admiring woman). When the infant Miles startles his pediatrician by talking, Sarah stocks up on books such as “A

Gifted Life” and “Nurturing Genius.”

We suspect, though, that she’s nurturing something else.

Miles has a sweet, sensitive nature but a propensity toward violence, too. He beats a fellow student with a pipe wrench and does something awful to the family pet, yet he claims to remember none of it.

We know something that the boy’s mother doesn’t — that Miles has some connection to a killer. Only slowly do we realize what the connection is and where it will lead both Miles and his too-willing mother.

“The Prodigy” deals in some very old tropes: the unknown ancient tongue, the hypnosis session, the journal full of creepy drawings.

What makes it all work is the execution.

Director Nicholas Mccarthy and writer Jeff Buhler (both of the 2012 film “The Pact”) pace the story nicely, building from mild shivers to violent jolts. The cloudy-day cinematography, by Bridger Nielson, is chilly and mournful. And Scott (who played Georgie in the 2017 film “It”) is wholly believable as a frightened yet frightening child.

“Mommy,” Miles says, snuggling against Sarah in the film’s follow-you-home moment, “will you love me no matter what I do?”