Not all teen horror is vapid. The film Grimcutty manages to make a completely next-level contribution to a genre packed with recycled tropes. Though the reviews were bad, they were wrong. Grimcutty likely struck a nerve with its parent-targeted moral panic narrative but will delight anyone with a sufficiently nuanced background in the study of curses. And as skeptics, there are few events more fitting of the word curse than moral panics.
The story is built loosely on the Momo Challenge, which gained some notoriety in 2019 but resulted in relatively little chaos. Grimcutty plays on the panic created by Momo in the figure of the eponymous demon who gains power along a vector of parental concern.
In the tradition of the best curse movies, the feedback loop of parental concern and control serves ostensibly to mitigate the internet meme’s harm, but it only manages to isolate the teenagers from the support of their friends, which is heavily diminished by their lack of social media access. The interplay of panic and prevention manufactures a dynamic best described by the law of reversed effect: The more concern the parents show for their children, the stronger Grimcutty gets, creating a cycle by which the parents’ worry escalates until their children really do become the victims of the demon.