The Grunch of Heavy Metal’s ‘Intrusion’ — a real cryptid?

Heavy Metal gives us one last creepy thing to ponder.

September 7, 2023

As a connoisseur of cryptozoological fiction, I’m always on the lookout for new media in this very niche genre. One recent example is the one-shot comic book Intrusion, from writer Ethan Sacks and artist Marco Lorenzana, published by the dearly departed Heavy Metal Magazine’s Magma Comix imprint.

Set in 1766, Intrusion tells the story of the Laguerre family who, after being exiled from Canada, resettle in the Louisiana bayou only to discover that the swampland already belongs to someone, or rather something, else – a vicious monster known as the Grunch.

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In an interview with CBR, writer Sacks commented that the idea for Intrusion was a result of his fascination with “the real history of the Acadian French[,] who were cast out of Canada by the British on their way to becoming the Cajuns of Louisiana,” as well as an “unhealthy obsession with cryptozoology.”

The Grunch of Heavy Metal's 'Intrusion' -- a real cryptid?

I must admit that I was not immediately familiar with the Grunch. Intrusion depicts it as a sort of scaly merman, not unlike the titular Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), or the amphibious humanoid from The Shape of Water (2017). Such creatures are not outside the realm of cryptozoology, as evidenced by the recent book Merbeings: The True Story of Mermaids, Mermen, and Lizardfolk. But, having just reviewed that book, I didn’t recall any mention of a bayou-based merbeing called the Grunch.

Clearly more research was called for.

Since the Grunch was supposed to be a cryptid, at least according to Sacks, I started by consulting several standard cryptozoological reference works, beginning with George M. Eberhart’s two-volume Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology (2002). No Grunch there. Next, I checked Michael Newton’s Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology: A Global Guide to Hidden Animals and Their Pursuers (2014), and then Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark’s Cryptozoology A To Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature (1999). Still no Grunch.

At this point I was becoming suspicious that while the Grunch may be a monster, it was no cryptid. So I moved on to some more general reference works with Giants, Monsters, and Dragons: An Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth (2001), by Carol Rose. And just to be thorough, I also checked Rose’s companion volume Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Goblins: An Encyclopedia (1996). Not a Grunch to be found between the two of them.

Could Sacks and Lorenzana have invented the Grunch? The name did sound awfully close to Dr. Seuss’ Grinch, after all. But I wasn’t quite ready to give up.

I already knew that David J. Puglia’s recently published North American Monsters: A Contemporary Legend Casebook (2022) didn’t have an entry on the Grunch. However, this book does contain a 10-page recommended reading list of sources dealing with all manner of North American monsters. Hoping against hope, I started scanning this list on the off chance there might be something on Louisiana monsters I could consult. What I found was even better: Harling, Kristie. “The Grunch: An Example of New Orleans Teen-Age Folklore,” Louisiana Folklore Miscellany vol. 3 no. 2 (1971): 15-20. Jackpot!

Unfortunately, the Louisiana Folklore Miscellany journal, published by the New Orleans based Louisiana Folklore Society, isn’t available online. I was able to put in a request with my university’s interlibrary loan service, though, and had the article in a few days.

Harling’s five-page article detailed her ethnographic investigation into Grunch folklore among New Orleans teenagers in the 1960s. She found that the Grunch was an urban legend of a familiar type: the monster (or maniac) that haunts a local lovers’ lane, lying in wait for amorous adolescents. Slightly more original was the type of monster the Grunch was reported to be. Rather than a merbeing, as seen in Intrusion, Harling’s teenage informants almost unanimously agreed that the Grunch was “half man and half sheep,” or sometimes “part goat.”

Harling’s primary interviewee, a 15-year-old girl named Doreene, said that the misshapen manimal was the result of a human man having sex with a female sheep. According to most of the teens, when the Grunch found young lovers getting frisky on his backroads, he’d either throw rocks at them or pound on the hood of their car to scare them. In a few cases teens reported hearing that the Grunch had killed someone, and at least one teen made clear what seems to be the obvious subtext of these stories, when he reported that if the Grunch found a teenage girl alone he’d “grab you in the woods and screw you.”

While waiting for Harling’s essay, I also chased down two more sources on the Grunch: Mary Alice Fontenot and Julie Landry’s The Louisiana Experience: An Introduction to the Culture of the Bayou State (1983), and J.J. Reneaux’s Haunted Bayou, and Other Cajun Ghost Stories (1994), which I also requested through the library. Both books contained brief sections on the Grunch, based entirely upon Harling’s original article. Fontenot and Landry added an interesting note that the legend of the Grunch was similar to a creature found in the folklore of Louisiana’s Avoyelles Parish “known as Jean Part Cheval, or Johnny Part Horse.”

Almost as a joke I decided to consult one more book on archive.org, famed monsterologist Daniel Cohen’s aptly named Monsters You’ve Never Heard Of (1980). It did have an entry on the Grunch! Cohen makes several excellent observations about the creature not even found in Harling’s original article. The first is that the Grunch is obviously a modern day take on the lascivious satyrs of Greco-Roman mythology. The second is that the Grunch also closely resembles the more widely known legends of so-called Goatmen found throughout the U.S., including Maryland, Texas, and Kentucky, where the satyr-like Pope Lick Monster has managed to rack up a disturbingly high body count.

Like the Grunch, these Goatmen are also associated with lovers’ lanes, as seen in horror author Nancy A. Collins’ The Thing from Lover’s Lane (1996). Cohen’s final observation is that the Grunch and Goatmen seem to have some relationship to Bigfoot and other North American anomalous primates in both their general description – big and hairy – and behavior: rock throwing. This of course can’t help but suggest Fallout 76’s Sheepsquatch, but in truth, it’s not uncommon for cryptids to be associated with lovers’ lane legends, with notable examples including Mothman and Cleveland’s Old Orange Eyes.

Does any of this make the Grunch a cryptid, in the traditional sense? Possibly. In his recent book, The United States of Cryptids (2022), J.W. Ocker writes that what separates cryptids from other monsters is their hypothetical existence: “Sure, we have fictional monsters in our movies and books, but a thousand Frankensteins and King Kongs and Grendels weigh far less than a single monster that is ‘based on a true story.’”

In her original article, Harling noted that while some of her teenage informants dismissed the reality of the Grunch – with one savvy kid even saying it was clearly just a story made up by boys in order to scare their girlfriends out of their skirts – a few seemed to genuinely believe in it, like Doreene, who insisted her father even had photos of the beast (though she was unable to produce them for Harling).

The Grunch of Heavy Metal's 'Intrusion' -- a real cryptid?

A final note, perhaps especially apt when dealing with the world of cryptozoology, is Harling’s observation that the primary reason for the repeating of Grunch lore among New Orleans’ male teenagers is that it conveys a kind of status upon those who know the most about the legend, transforming them into “a kind of hero [who] all look up to […] not as one who has faced up to a Grunch, but as an expert on the Grunch. He will be in great demand to retell the story over and over again. All this can be very satisfying, and it is definitely to the advantage of these boys to keep the Grunch stories alive.”

AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.