Director/Screenplay – John William Ross, Producers – David Moore & Dawn Fanning Moore, Photography – Bridger Nielson, Music – Sara Barone, Visual Effects – FixItInPost (Supervisor – Cody Stoltz), Creature Effects Designer – Andrew Clement, Grimcutty Creature Design – Creative Character Engineering, Makeup Effects – Erica “Bunny” Armendariz, Production Design – Erin Dallesandro. Production Company – 20th Digital Studio.
Cast
Sara Wolfkind (Asha Chaudhry), Shannyn Sossamon (Leah Chaudhry), Usman Ally (Amir Chaudhry), Callan Farris (Kamran Chaudhry), Tate Moore (Cassidy Johnson), Joel Ezra Hebner (Grimcutty), Alona Tal (Melinda Jaynes), Malaya Valenzuela (Emily Litman), Kayden Koshelev (Brandon Jaynes), Justin Jarzombek (Oliver)
Plot
Fears are going around of the Grimcuttty meme, a figure that appears on social media and supposedly causes teenagers to cut themselves. Teenager Asha Chaudhry and her younger brother Kamran find that their parents are reacting to this in unreasonable ways and insisting that their phones and computers be placed in a lockbox. Asha breaks into the lockbox to get her phone but is then startled by the appearance of the sinister figure of Grimcutty that then attacks her. Teens everywhere are being affected by this. As Asha investigates, she finds that somehow the meme is forcing parents to become paranoid and overprotective and that the Grimcutty entity is feeding off this.
As cellular and social media technology have made greater inroads into society, we have had various horror films jump on board the new trend. The cellphone has become the centre of several horror films in recent years from Selfie from Hell (2018) to Mr. Harrigan’s Phone (2022), while we have had social media horrors from Unfriended (2014) and Friend Request (2016) and even evil phone apps in Bedeviled (2016), You Die: Get the App, Then Die (2018), Countdown (2019) and Byte (2024). Meme horrors appear to be the relatively new thing, although you would probably have to count the earlier Slender Man (2018) as one such. The film that Grimcutty seems to have the greatest similarities to is Come Play (2020) about an entity emerged from a child’s e-book.
The internet meme boogeyman idea didn’t do much for me. It seemed as I sat down to watch that Grimcutty was just going to be another formula teen horror film. My expectations weren’t exactly disappointed in this regard, but it must be said that the film does have some interesting angles to it. One of these is that it taps into parental fears about internet addiction and influencers doing crazy stunts driving children to harm themselves.
In fact, Grimcutty is less interesting as the Boogeyman film it is than as a film about these parental fears gone amok – we later learn that these fears are something that the creature amplifies and feeds on. As the father, Usman Alley plays with a perpetually cross expression and in almost no time exhibits parental behaviour that is highly demanding and controlling, let alone manipulative. The actual Grimcutty when it appears looks like some weird cross between a CGI Halloween figure and an inflatable doll that just seems too unreal to seem believable. Director John William Ross delivers some passably okay scenes with people being stalked or the Grimcutty ominously appearing down hallways, or of contrast shots that show the attacked person being levitated in mid-air cutting those unable to see Grimcutty.
The Grimcutty attacks
The film reaches a standard resolution but one that seems more convenient wrap-up than makes any real sense. For no real reason, Shannyn Sossamon seems to make an abrupt switch from paranoid parent to suddenly seeing sense and charging into Alona Tal’s house to rescue her imprisoned son. And the logical whys of the entire set-up just leave you confused – people are haunted by an internet meme come to life that makes their parents turn paranoid and repeat by rote some instructions about banning their children from the internet. I mean, if there is anything designed to kill a meme’s spread, it would be exactly that – banning people from internet access. Nor did I quite grasp explanations as to how Alona Tal managed to end up spreading the things that become mindlessly repeated by the parents – like why her blog would do so rather than all the other misinformation out there.
Grimcutty was the second full-length film from John William Ross who previously made Shadows of the Dead (2016) and before that quite a reasonable number of short films.