Dread sits down with filmmaker Eli Roth to get the scoop on his next gruesome horror picture, ‘Ice Cream Man’.
Eli Roth is a filmmaker with a sweet tooth for horror without restraint. Between films like Cabin Fever, Hostel, and Thanksgiving, you know that when you put on a Roth film, you’re going to watch something violent, bloody, and totally deranged. That’s the case with his latest pic, Ice Cream Man, a Troma-esque tale that sees the tune of an ice cream truck transforming the children of a small town into bloodthirsty fiends.
Packed into a cool ninety minutes are loads of gruesome effects and zombified kiddos wreaking gory havoc on their parents. It contains every flavor audiences associate with Roth, topped with the syrupy fact that it’s the filmmaker’s first film under his banner, The Horror Section.
Dread recently had a chance to sit down with Roth and get the bloody scoop on Ice Cream Man.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the titular figure stalk screens. Perhaps the most well-known example is the 1995 Ice Cream Man starring Clint Howard in the villainous role. But for Roth, he’s had his take on the killer treat-slinger driving around in his head for a while now.
“You know, it’s interesting. I wasn’t conscious of anything,” says the filmmaker. “It was during the Cabin Fever press tour. I remember I heard an ice cream truck, and it just triggered these memories of summertime in Massachusetts. You know, you’re in someone’s swimming pool, and you run out, dripping wet in the street, money in your hand, chasing after the ice cream truck to get that ice cream. And I remember looking at this ice cream man thinking, ‘What if this dude is a serial killer?‘ All the kids who were lining up…he could be poisoning the kids.”
Roth continues, “There’s this inherent trust with ice cream men where we don’t question it when they roll into town. You’ve never seen them before, and you eat their ice cream. There’s this contract where we trust the ice cream man. I thought, well, that’s too dark if you just do an ice cream man killing kids, but what if it was like the Pied Piper? What if he wanted to control the kids? Then there’s the music. It’s like this Pavlovian response. And that’s what was interesting to me. What if you could use the tune to trigger the kids in combination with the food, and then they all killed their parents? I had this idea of the kids hearing the song in the middle of the night, and getting up and killing their parents, then going to school. They’re killing the teachers, and getting stronger. And it becomes this full-blown kid apocalypse.”
If you hadn’t guessed already, the kids of Ice Cream Man are not all right.
The horror genre, however, has been flourishing in ways neither Roth nor I could’ve ever possibly imagined. That’s what drove him to want to finally make this movie.
“I wrote the script with my friend Noah Belson, and for years, people were like, ‘This is too crazy,’” says Roth. “’This is too sick. There’s no way to make this movie. You’ll never get an R-rating. You’ll never get kids to do this stuff.’ Anytime I have an idea where people go, that’s too sick, that’s too crazy, I lean in. It was Terrifier 3 where I said, look how mainstream this is. You can do a 2000 screen release with an unrated movie. You know, Terrifier is an incredible film and deserved it. But I thought, we’re here now. We’re at the point where gore is so mainstream. But I had to do it outside the studio system. I had to set up my own studio to go directly to the theaters, and say, we are bypassing studios. I am not dealing with another person telling me, ‘Take that out of the movie. That’s too sick. You can’t do that’. I don’t want to hear it anymore. I just want to make my movies and put them in theaters.”
It’s something we don’t talk about often, but Roth’s right to point out just how wild it is that we live in a time where movies like Terrifier 3 can do gangbusters at the box office. Not to sound like too much of a boomer, but back in my day, that was unheard of.
Because of the new splatter era we’re in, Roth didn’t even consider shooting for an R-rating.
Says the filmmaker, “I’m not interested in that. When I saw Re-Animator as a kid, I couldn’t believe what I was watching. It was so transgressive. It crossed every boundary. It was like, what lunatic made this movie? And when I saw Evil Dead 2 unrated in the theaters, I thought, I’ve never seen anything like this. This is the greatest horror movie ever made. Hands down, not even a close second. I wanted that kind of a feeling, where we’re in this incredible horror renaissance right now. It’s exploding at the box office, and I want to give people that kind of thrill where they go, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that before’.Gen Z is discovering that you can pirate a movie, but you can’t pirate that adrenaline rush.It’s like Coachella. You gotta go live. It’s not the same watching it on your phone. You can get comedy on your phone, you can get drama on TV, but that thrill, that heart-pounding adrenaline rush, you have to see it in a theater before someone spoils it. It’s the ultimate thrill ride. You’ve got to be on the roller coaster, and I wanted to build the baddest, craziest, scariest roller coaster in the park.”
In that regard, Ice Cream Man lives up to the promise, unleashing one scene after another of wild kills and extreme gore. When asked if anything was cut during the script-to-screen process, Roth tells me “No”. What you see is exactly what the filmmaker intended…but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any restraint where necessary.
“There’s a certain point where you can cross a line with an audience, and not in a good way. You want to shock people, and you want them horrified, but they still have to be wanting to see what’s next. You want them hungry for the next thing. They should be dreading what else is coming, but going, ‘I’ve got to see it.’ So, it’s constantly misdirecting the audience, but engaging them in the story and in the characters.”
Making such a gory film with a cast led by young actors may sound difficult, but Roth assures me that wasn’t the case in the slightest.
“I got so lucky with my leads. They were such fantastic young actors. And that’s what I wanted was great young actors, not kid actors. You know, I wanted a cast like Stranger Things, where you’re watching the young kids and going, these kids are absolutely incredible. I wanted a movie that started like an Amblin movie, and then just twisted and turned on its head by taking the primary colors of Pee-wee’s Playhouse and splattering them with blood.”
But did the parents of the cast have any issues with the violence of the film?
“No. The parents are younger than me. They’re horror movie fans,” says Roth. “They’ve all seen Thanksgiving and Hostel. And the kids have seen everything. They’ve watched every episode of The Walking Dead. They know who Art the Clown is. Even if they haven’t seen the movie, they’ve watched scenes on YouTube. There’s nothing the kids haven’t seen. I was very upfront about what we were doing. Even with the extras, we were like, we’re doing horror, we’re doing gore. The parents have to have visual eye contact with their children at all times. So they’re [the parents] with me, either next to me or at the monitor, and they’re like, ‘You know, my daughter would love a fake head, and my son really wants to be covered in blood’. They were having the time of their lives. Kids love pretending to be monsters.”
He can say that again. All I ever wanted to be as a kid was The Wolf Man or whatever other creature had caught my attention at the time. I would’ve had the time of my life appearing in a gory horror pic.
Speaking of the gore, Roth once again worked with a familiar face in prosthetic makeup effects designer Steve Newburn, whose work brought a sense of fun to the set.
Explains Roth, “We had an incredible effects crew. Steve Newburn and his team did such an amazing job. Steve and his team handled the bulk of the effects in that playground attack. And the kids loved it. Once you laid out the fake heads and the intestines, the kids started laughing and grabbing them and tossing the heads. That was the fun of it. They all knew it was pretend. We’re creating generations of horror fans, and the parents said, ‘We’re so happy that now we can show them scarier horror movies, because now they understand how fake it all is.’”
With Ice Cream Man, Roth hopes to deliver a gore-soaked summer treat unrestricted by rules. And if it does well, there’ll be a lot more where that came from.
“I want to do stuff that doesn’t play by Hollywood’s rules,” says Roth. “I want to do stuff that, when you see a Horror Section movie, you go, no one else would have had the balls to make that movie. There’s nobody else putting out movies like this. I want the label to have that kind of sizzle to it. So, it’s really important that, for the survival of movies like this, people get out there to see it. We don’t have the backing of a big studio. We’re doing this on a super low budget without the money that they have. That’s okay. That’s fine. You get to take more chances and do more insane stuff. I think that, when people see Ice Cream Man, there’s not gonna be anything quite like it in the theater.”
Ice Cream Man scoops into theaters nationwide on August 7th via The Horror Section.
(This interview has been edited for time and clarity)
