Over 20 years ago, Eli Roth had a dream. One oozing with dread and viscera, and sticky with the relentless drip of slowly melting ice cream. The images it burned into his fevered brain were vivid and rich, thrilling and shocking. One even featured a group of schoolchildren in a playground, enjoying a spot of jump-rope with human entrails. Another of a few more playing a game of tag with a recently severed hand.
Today, Roth is about to unveil to the world the results of that blood-red vision, a masterpiece of murderous mayhem now more than two decades in the making. A movie he claims is “the most insane” one that he has ever made. Which, given the nine that have preceded it, is quite the statement. It is also, as audiences are about to discover, entirely justified.
Roth’s 10th movie is Ice Cream Man, a story that deliciously takes something supposedly innocent – an ice cream van trundling into an idyllic town one hot and sunny summer’s day – and perverts it into mass-scale matricide and patricide, shot with invention, intensity and pitch-black wit.
The concept for this pioneering picture first hit the director after he had made his dynamite debut, Cabin Fever, in 2002, with Roth and his friend, Noah Belson (who also cameoed in Cabin Fever as ‘Guitar Man’), crafting a script soon after.
“Long ago in the before-times, about two decades ago roughly, Eli hired me to write a draft of an idea he had for a movie about a mysterious ice cream man who causes kids to go nuts and start doing absolutely horrible things,” Belson says now. “I had a lot of fun writing it and even more fun hashing out ideas with Eli since when we get together we’re both basically 12 again, which is the age we were when we met.”
The problem was, as Roth recalls, “back then it was just too big of a movie,” given its scale at that point in his then-fledgling career. “So, it became one of those ideas that I shelved for a long time. But still this idea wouldn’t let me sleep at night. It was one of those ideas that you’ve always got to pay attention to, or they’ll make you go insane.”
Some time later, when Roth was hot off the back of Hostel, his spectacularly gruesome 2005 sophomore feature that had asked the question of just how far audiences were willing to be taken into the realm of gore-soaked carnage, and been answered with a resounding $82 million global box office, off a budget of just $4.8, his mind returned to the idea. “When, after Hostel, everyone was asking me what was next, I knew the answer, but didn’t know how to pull it off,” the director remembers.
For a while during this period, for Roth it seemed like the world only ever wanted to ask him the same question: “What’s next? What’s next?” But even though he was sure deep in his gut what that next step should be, the studio suits were somewhat less certain, alarmed by the sheer outrageousness of what he wanted Ice Cream Man to be.
“Over the years we’d often discussed Ice Cream Man, as well as tossed around new and horrific ways for kids to murder people. Some of them weren’t even for the script, but when I can think of a new way for kids to brutalize adults, Eli is the first person I call,” Belson deadpans.
“Then about a year ago, Eli sent me a new draft of the script and he’d basically cracked the code that took it from a script with tons of wonderful violence to an actual story with serious stakes and characters that felt very vivid, basically like people you’ve known all your life/always wanted to see get murdered (in a movie). I read the script several times and made a ton of notes about possible additional story beats, as well as suggesting a lot of jokes and gags, because I feel like if you’re gonna kill a bunch of people, you might as well make people laugh while doing it. I mean maybe not if you’re doing it in real life but definitely if you’re doing it in a movie, laughter helps a lot. And, after a couple of months of back and forth, it just seemed like Ice Cream Man was finally ready to burst forth with all its gory goodness.”
Indeed, now, finally, Roth is ready to unveil the finished result to an international audience that had better be ready for it. Because they’re about to meet a new horror icon set to sit proudly and bloodily alongside the likes of Freddy, Jason, Michael, Leatherface, Candyman and more, and dig a savage ice cream scoop deep into everyone’s brains while it’s at it.
“This movie is something truly special,” says Ari Millen, the man who plays the eponymous agent of evil himself. “Ice Cream Man is going to transcend horror. This experience is unlike anything anyone has ever seen. It’s like Home Alone meets 28 Days Later. It’s hysterical. It’s terrifying. It’s going to live on its own plane.” Or, as Charlie Storey, who plays the standout role of Piper, says: “This is creepy on a whole new
level.”
In a nutshell, Ice Cream Man is a fable, a fairytale even. A cautionary story of a lone confectionary vendor who motors into Bayleen Bay, the fictional town in which the film is set, one balmy day to dispense his wares. Then all hell breaks loose.
“That’s because when he gives all the kids his ice cream, it makes them go crazy and kill all the adults,” Roth grins. “It’s my version of a Pied Piper tale. I’ve always wanted to make a movie like The Birds, a full-on apocalypse. But with children.”
Whenever Roth would tell friends about the idea, they’d badger him to make it, desperate to see this uniquely abominable proposition come to life. The studios, though, proved to be singularly less enthusiastic, terrified by the flagrant boundary-stretching scope and ambition of the concept.
“The other answer to why I hadn’t made Ice Cream Man before was that no one would give me the money for it!” Roth laughs. “Studios would read the script and go, ‘You can’t ask children to do that! How could you make a movie like this, with children chopping up their parents, cutting off their heads with hacksaws and playing jump-rope with their guts?’ But I’m like, ‘Yeah! I want to see that movie!’”
What makes Eli Roth so ideal to tell this story, says Kiori Mirza Waldman, who plays young Mia in Ice Cream Man, is the kid inside him too. “Eli is so sweet, friendly and funny. He’s a great director but he also has an amazing energy,” she says.
It’s a sentiment the director doesn’t disagree with. And which made him perfectly positioned. “What studios don’t realize is that kids love all that stuff. Kids love playing monsters, they love horror, Halloween. And children understand that it’s all make-believe. It’s the parents who are more nervous about it,” smiles Roth.
“Remember when you were a kid and played ‘Ghosts in the Graveyard’? Kids are always pretending. They love all the gore and guts. On this, when we put them in the ice cream make-up, these children transformed. I didn’t have to direct them. They all wanted blood. We were just like, ‘Okay, who wants a leg? Who wants an arm?’”
To confirm his point, Roth reflects on the day of shooting Ice Cream Man’s most spectacular set-piece, in a movie loaded with them. It takes place when, with the Ice Cream Man having dished out his delectable wares to the children in the previously sleepy Bayleen Bay, they all turn hilariously feral, descending on their school with the sticky remnants of ice cream on their lips, and murder on their minds.
“That big day at the school was the first week of the shoot,” Roth says. “We were filming basically the kid-pocalypse, 80 children covered in blood and ice cream going absolutely nuts, playing jump rope with guts, basketball with heads, tossing around limbs. It was insane, but the kids were having the time of their lives! That’s the fun of the movie, this idea that the kids don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. For them, that day is just like Christmas morning – only with body parts.”
To make that Christmas Day a reality, Roth had eventually realized that trying to greenlight this movie through the studio system was a fruitless endeavor. That to do it would mean branching out on his own.
“That’s why after Thanksgiving [Roth’s 2023 feature-length adaptation of his own faux trailer that sat within Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse double-bill in 2007], I decided to form my own company, a new mini-studio called The Horror Section,” he says. “And I thought Ice Cream Man would be a great first film for it.”
For Millen, the appeal of headlining Ice Cream Man was threefold. On the one hand was the challenge of the role itself – the character doesn’t have a single line of dialogue, conveying his menace through facial and body movements alone – on the other, the calibre of the director and his team.
“One of my teachers once said to me, ‘There are three variables in a project: a good cast, a good director, a good script. And it’s very rare that all three line up.’ This movie is all three wrapped up into one and then some,” Millen reveals.
Mainly, though, it was the sheer fire and exuberance that Millen could feel pumping through the project’s veins. “This really is 20 years in the making,” Millen says. “Eli had been told ‘no’ over and over again. In the end, he just said, ‘Fuck it. I’m going to make it myself.’ Now he’s done it. And you can feel his passion.”
It’s not to say that Millen didn’t have any hesitation the day he first stepped onto the set of Ice Cream Man in costume, as the main man himself. But whatever concerns he might have been imagining instantly dissipated as soon as the cameras started to roll.
“You might think that after 20 years of trying to get this movie made, it would be very precious for Eli, that it’d be his baby and he would have a very distinct vision of who this character was,” Millen says.
“The initial fear for me was, ‘Maybe this will be micromanaged.’ But it was the opposite. When Eli and I first talked, we were on the same wavelength of who this guy was. He invited my input. He supported my vision. Because of how fast we shot this, things moved quickly. But I don’t think he gave me one redirect, which was terrifying but incredibly freeing.”
That creative liberty has resulted in a movie that throbs with the exuberance and enthusiasm of the man behind it, that speaks to the confidence of a director in total command of a genre his work has gone such a long way to redefine. It also meant that Ice Cream Man was pretty much as much fun to make out on set in Toronto, over 19 lightning-paced, blood-soaked days in August 2025, as it will be to watch.
Then again, that dichotomy between terror and fun has always been a staple of Roth’s style. From that outrageous leg-shaving scene in Cabin Fever to the spiky trampoline of Thanksgiving, his work has always taken audiences on a roller coaster of emotions. And Ice Cream Man, say his collaborators, sees that approach turned up to the max.
“We’re infusing Eli’s style and sensibility into everything we do at The Horror Section, and that starts with Ice Cream Man. It’s a gnarly, scary ride, but at the end of the day it’s entertainment and we want filmgoers to know they’re going to have a uniquely fun and exhilarating time at the theater,” says Executive Producer and CEO of The Horror Section Jon Schnaars.
As for the man selling the ice creams, he couldn’t agree more that this unique mix of scares and laughs is going to have people, rather like kids at an ice cream truck on a warm summer’s day, coming back for more and more, over and over.
“It’s the juxtaposition of children and the games they play with the brutality and imagery that Eli brings to his movies that makes this so compelling,” Millen says.
“People are going to have a lot of fun with that, because they’re going to be laughing while being disgusted, all at the same time.”