GRIMCUTTY: Fresh Gen Z Creepypasta Carnage

Those damn teens and their smartphones! Grimcutty is a creepypasta made tangible, a horror tale with much more going on than your standard monster movie or slasher. Grimcutty combines Gen Z high school drama with a story about self-harm, paranoia, overbearing parents, and the internet in a way that actually feels incredibly refreshing, prescient, and scary as hell.

Just a brief warning before we delve into plot specifics and how dope Grimcutty is: This movie, and the review, contains a good deal about self-harm.

Aren’t We All Just Trying To Break Into The ASMR Scene?

Asha Chaudhry (Sara Wolfkind) is trying to be an influencer. She has a Blue Yeti-looking mic and cat ear headphones and records ASMR videos for YouTube for fewer than a dozen followers. Struggling for popularity online, she at least has her best friend (Malaya Valenzuela) to help take her mind off her overbearing parents — Amir (Usman Ally) and Leah (Shannyn Sossamon) — and her playful yet contentious relationship with her younger brother, Kamran (Callan Farris).

Already the scene is set for a social media–driven teen drama: Asha has a clearly defined goal we immediately empathize with. In our internet age, when so much of our lives is spent online, popularity reminds us we exist. Asha dropped the track team and has become, in her mother’s eyes, reclusive — spurned by her own family, she’s turned to the internet for recognition.

As technology inhabits every second of our lives, the measures Asha’s parents undertake — “phone-free family outings” and, later, a “Detox box” in which to lock their devices — seem futile and regressive. But they’re propelled by fear and ignorance. Grimcutty knows that technology and the internet is inescapable, and that as much as you can get lost in the digital world, the relationship can be parasitic.

The “Grimcutty challenge” scares the shit out of Amir and Leah for that reason. A creepypasta (that’s internet lingo for “viral scary thing”) that’s an obvious stand-in for the real-life internet hoax Momo, the Grimcutty is a spooky nightmare demon face that can be sent via text or embedded in videos, and the “challenge” supposedly makes kids hurt or even kill themselves, or others. It’s rumored that its first victim was a child (Kayden Alexander Koshelev) who stabbed his own mother (Alona Tal).

Similar creepypasta and Gen Z urban legend films include Slender Man and an endless trove of short films on YouTube, from Backrooms to that one where the smiling dude is spycrab-walking down the street. Both have scared the shit out of me. The series Channel Zero also does a new creepypasta every season, and more popular forebears or emulators of the style include Ringu (haunted videotapes are very chic), The Bye Bye Man (lol remember that?), and the underseen gem The Empty Man. I should apologize to Jane Schoenbrun, whose own teen creepypasta horror, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, which I haven’t seen, is obviously the best comparison to Grimcutty. Schoenbrunn’s film and Grimcutty, written and directed by John Ross, represent the first major explorations of this subgenre.

Creepypasta Fresca

Grimcutty is, at first glance, another parable of the “perils of smartphones,” the kind of out-of-touch technophobic movie with dialogue like an adult holding up a phone and saying, “Man, I am just addicted to this new smartphone thing!” And there’s some of that in Grimcutty, but you aren’t supposed to agree with the out-of-touch parents here.

All the parents in town get notifications of the dangers of the “Grimcutty challenge,” and that fear makes them hysterical. Only, none of the kids have ever seen the challenge online — their parents are the only ones who seem to know what it is. But the evil is both imagined and far from it: After Asha’s parents kick into full-on nervous breakdown mode over the Grimcutty, Asha has an encounter with the real thing. It slips into her house in the middle of the night and cuts her, right down the wrist. The cops don’t believe her — as is mostly the case in Gen Z horror movies, the police are realistically depicted as being utterly useless.

The parents are delusional, under some invisible spell that causes them to lash out unpredictably and not believe their kids — like that Danny Phantom episode where the ghost singer hypnotizes all the adults in town. You know what I’m talking about. Amir and Leah lock away Asha’s phone and computer, severing her from any lifeline. With no phone and no other options besides wait for the Grimcutty to return, Asha unites with her younger brother and an antisocial pariah at school (Tate Moore, all scowls and sour moods) and decides to get to the bottom of the meme.

I know that Grimcutty has been unfairly maligned by many critics, so going into this, I feel a bit like “Grimcutty Defender has logged on” here. Because look — horror movies are asked to do a lot nowadays, thanks to A24-distributed thematically heavy horror that tends to put its cart before its horse. Grimcutty succeeds in being legitimately scary — if a horror movie can make you afraid to walk around your house in the dark, it’s a good one. Grimcutty’s scares come fast and early, orchestrated not like cheap jump-scares or the creeping dread of an Ari Aster or Jordan Peele joint, but like East Asian low-budget creature features, where all you need is a thick atmosphere, a dark house, and a well-designed monster to scare the piss out of you. That’s the thing — the Grimcutty is a real thing, and this bitch can run. It’d be creepy if all the film showed was this black-and-white creepypasta mime peering out from an open doorway, but in most of the encounters, Grimcutty chases its victims down, and the framing always makes sure to keep Grimcutty in the rearview for maximum butthole-clenching.

The film’s effective at keeping the scares going while impressing you with its slick camerawork. Cinematographer Bridger Nielson knows when to play a wide shot for shock value — as in the multiple times we see the Grimcutty lift a character into the air or against a wall like that telepathic kid in Looper — or when to follow the action with tight, rigid, adrenaline-spiked control, as when Asha steals her phone and has to slink around her home at night avoiding her parents while the Grimcutty could be lurking anywhere.

The monster itself — designed by Creative Character Engineering and Andy Clement and brought to life by actor Joel Ezra Hebner and stuntman Bryan McCoy — resembles Momo a bit in the face, but its long, sharklike smile is a mix of the bizarro masked creepfest of Possibly in Michigan and the Japanese legend of the Kuchisake-onna, the slit-mouthed woman. Except the slit-mouthed woman can be distracted, apparently, by hard candy, and the Grimcutty is 7 feet of pure murderous aggression. Seeing that dude flop around the house or run down the street is utterly dread-inducing. In a smart sound design choice, the monster seems to whisper to its victims, like Asha’s ASMR videos, framing the Grimcutty as a personification of the internet itself.

Don’t Fear The Grimcutty

It’s hard to pinpoint why Grimcutty has gotten such negative press. I think it’s attributable to two separate phenomena — one, that Prestige Horror has poisoned people’s brains and made them forget that some of the best movies are powered by a core idea and a scary creature design, and two, that Gen Z shit is cringe as f*ck as shouldn’t be in films.

Grimcutty has much more than a core idea — it’s about generational divides and about how f*cking scary it is when you can’t trust your parents to have your best interests at heart. It’s about how the world is changing at such a fast pace that what’s trendy now is going to be old news by next Tuesday, and what’s considered dystopian today will be the new norm in a year.

Remember how mysterious chatrooms of all things were back when Kairo came out of Japan in the early 2000s? Horror’s always been about tapping into societal and cultural insecurities, and it’s nice to see one that doesn’t shy away from the 21st century and embraces it for all its messy, cringy, paranoid ecstasy.

Part of the appeal of creepypastas — and other online horror communities and forums, like SCP Foundation or the stories of the excellent horror fiction writer Kris Straub — is how much is left to the imagination. Written horror invites you to envision your face in place of a character’s and more easily allows your fears to assimilate theirs. I’m not sure there’s much a film can do to extend that fear into the visual when it already thrives in a living medium like wikis and message boards.

Thankfully, Grimcutty answers only the questions it has to; the creature’s origins aren’t disclosed, less for sequel bait and more so as to not ruin the mystique. And other answers just lead to more questions, or to a mommy blogger with a shotgun. But at every turn, Grimcutty is smart enough to keep you guessing.

Ross cleverly writes a script that justifies its low budget, effectively using the lack of communication and claustrophobic nature of being stuck at home with your parents to give his movie a sound reason to have limited locations and a small cast. When a school auditorium scene is shot with fewer than two dozen extras, it tracks with the story. (Though he really missed a trick not setting this in Scotland. They’d pronounce the shit outta “Grimcutty.”)

Across the board, the performers, especially the young ones, take the material and run with it. Grimcutty calls for its parents to be over-the-top anxiety machines, always two tics away from turning into psychos, and Ally and Sossamon meet the mania head-on. Sossamon has the chance in the third act to turn into a badass, a role she plays with relish, while Ally becomes more and more menacing before a final long exhale of a scene in which he finally realizes what he’s done.

Wolfkind’s work as Asha is appropriately fierce, funny, sensitive, and nervous — from the insecure ASMR to the wide-eyed terror and finally the gutsy, heroic big sister, Wolfkind plays the hell out of the role. She’s got bottomless reserves of pathos, and Ross even trusts her to give a final ASMR address to the audience at the end of the picture. She’s the latest in a line of amazing young actresses emerging in Hollywood, many of whom got their start in horror: Wolfkind stands shoulder-to-shoulder in Grimcutty with Amber Midthunder in Prey, Jenna Ortega in X and Scream, Devery Jacobs in Rhymes for Young Ghouls and Blood Quantum, Anya Taylor-Joy in The Witch and Split, and Blu Hunt in The New Mutants — a legion of Gen Z Final Girls.

Conclusion

Grimcutty is a surprising, terrifying, fun creature feature, and beneath the skin, there’s an upsetting, pulsing heart of trauma and pain. Grimcutty, after all the scares, stabbings, and memes, is about the vicious cycle of parents inflicting pain on their children, whether they know it or not. You don’t have to reach for the mental health subtext — it’s there in the premise. Grimcutty “makes the kids hurt themselves.” But really, the Grimcutty is holding the knife. Parents find it easier to blame their children and an internet hoax than to listen to their kids. Asha’s mounting desperation in the face of her parents reminds us about how often kids need to be traumatized in order for parents to realize that they’re wrong.

Grimcutty should have gotten a theatrical release. This is a great horror movie, but it’s also a great watch for teens, and it deserves far more than the unceremonious dump on Hulu that it received.

I obviously can’t speak for all of Gen Z — but in America, anyway, most parents over 40 don’t go to therapy and stigmatize seeking help and recovery. And the more that recovery is treated as a curse, the more trauma children, teens, and twenty-somethings have to put up with until they’re either mentally beaten into submission or something terrible happens. The Grimcutty is a man in a CG costume. But like all monsters, it’s an embodiment of a real fear. It’s just sometimes easier to deal with a man in a rubber-and-CGI suit than it is to deal with teen suicide, depression, and a world changing too fast for anyone to keep up.

What did you think of Grimcutty? Comment below and let us know.

Grimcutty is currently streaming on Hulu.

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