via Ice Cream Man / Eli Roth
Eli Roth was calling action on the set of his new horror movie and nobody is moving.
A hundred kids in zombie makeup are standing on a playground, drenched in fake blood, staring at him. A six-year-old raises his hand like he’s in class. Roth points at him, ready for a question about his motivation. The kid says his shoe is untied. Roth tells him to go ahead and tie it, we’ve got all day. The hand goes up again. This time the kid asks where his mom is, because he doesn’t actually know how to tie his shoes yet.
The lead actor, a kid named Shiloh, walks over and ties them for him. And then, in Roth’s words, the six-year-old “goes to hacking up the teacher.”
That’s ICE CREAM MAN, which is in theaters now. Roth wrote it with his friend Noah Belson back in 2003, shopped it around for two decades, and got told the same thing every time. Too sick. Unfilmable. You can’t ask children to do this. So he stopped asking permission. He made it independently, released it unrated, and shot the whole thing in 19 days.
“This is what I look like when no one’s telling me that’s a bad idea,” Roth told me. “What are you doing?”
I sat down with him at BroBible to talk about the movie, and I’ll be honest, I couldn’t stop laughing through most of it, which is exactly the reaction he’s after and also the one that’s going to get him in trouble.
The pitch that broke every studio’s brain
Roth has made studio movies. He’s made independent ones. He knows where the line is, and he knew Ice Cream Man was on the wrong side of it before he ever finished the script.
“I also knew for this movie, with like 100 killer kids just hacking off their parents’ heads with hacksaws and taking fire axes and playing jump rope with their teachers’ intestines and tetherball with a human head,” he said, “there’s no studio that’s gonna go, this is all right, go ahead.”
He wanted a movie so unhinged that people couldn’t even describe it to their friends. Mission accomplished. When I told him the whole thing left me speechless in the best way, he lit up.
“I love horror movies that are just batshit crazy,” he said. “I made it unrated, independently, released it on my own, so there were no constraints on it.”
The constraints, historically, are the notes. The money shows up and the voices follow. Roth’s had creative control on the lower-budget stuff going back to Cabin Fever, but he’s felt the machine tighten as budgets climb, even on something like Thanksgiving. Ice Cream Man was his shot at zero interference, and he took it.
Why the kids treated a bloodbath like Christmas morning
The movie is campy, over-the-top, and certain-to-be-controversial. In a way, that’s the thing Roth kept circling back to. The kids in this movie are not evil, even though they’re inflicting horrific acts on the adults. They think they’re in a cartoon.
“It’s like Looney Tunes,” he said. “They’re like, oh, it’s Christmas morning.”
That framing unlocked the whole approach to the kills, which Roth wanted to be creative rather than just brutal. A lot of it came straight out of his own childhood. The playground sequence, the one he correctly predicted would become the meme, opens with a paper cutter taking a hand off. That’s autobiographical, sort of.
“I did that in school in seventh grade in Boston,” he said. “I brought a fake hand into school and scrunched up my hand in the sweatshirt, and in art class I was like, Mr. Robinson, hey, and I full speed slammed it down. He screamed and almost had a heart attack. And I was like, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
So the movie’s kids chop the hand off and then immediately do what actual kids would do. They play tag with it. If you’re holding the hand, you’re it. Roth calls it hand tag. From there it spirals into pencils in eyes, popsicle sticks, and a “taffy pull” where the kids split a teacher apart and then use what’s left to play jump rope.
The intestines, for the record, did not cooperate.
“They were way heavier than we anticipated,” Roth said. “We had kids that could do double dutch and rehearse, and then the intestines were more like the ropes at the gym, the battle ropes.”
When the double dutch fell through, he pivoted. He had two little girls sit down next to a dead teacher and play cat’s cradle with the guts instead. This is the level of problem-solving we’re dealing with.
Watch our full conversation on the BroBible YouTube channel:
The stage moms were the real horror show
You’d think the parents would be the brakes on something like this. You’d be wrong. Roth said any parent who didn’t want their kid in a movie like this got filtered out long before the shoot. What was left was a generation of horror fans raising horror fans, and they showed up to set like Little League parents.
“The parents are coming up to me going, my daughter would like a fake head, my kid needs more blood,” Roth said. “They’re all like stage moms, but they want their kids to be holding more intestines.”
One kid asked to do a blood angel, a snow angel in a pool of blood. A girl with glasses volunteered to take a blast of pressurized blood to the face from a rigged fire extinguisher during a head-smashing scene, on the one condition that she got to keep her glasses on. Her mom was standing right there.
“Then the mom’s like, that was the most wonderful day, you were so sweet to spray blood in my daughter’s face,” Roth said. “She had the best time ever.”
The kids didn’t want the makeup off at the end of the day. They wanted photos covered in gore. Roth’s description of the vibe on set is the tidiest summary of the entire movie: “It was like Christmas and Halloween rolled into one.”
For the record, Roth was a camp counselor. He does not raise his voice. He keeps it fun. He is, by his own account, great with a gaggle of kids, which explains a lot and also raises new questions.
“You can’t pirate the adrenaline rush”
The reason Ice Cream Man isn’t just a gross-out exercise is that Roth refuses to play it for laughs, even though it’s frequently hilarious. He wants it horrible and real at the same time.
“I want it to be horrible, but I want it to be real,” he said. “It’s not being played for laughs, but it’s so absurd and so crazy, I find it fucking hilarious.”
He’s braced for the split. Test screenings already gave him both ends of it. One person stood up and stormed out calling the movie evil. Another group produced a running vomit, which delighted him.
“I was like, oh please, if there’s a running vomit, TikTok it, please,” he said.
That’s the whole bet. Roth thinks the culture got loud and desensitized, that kids have seen every episode of Walking Dead and know exactly what Terrifier is, and that the taboo of a movie like this has mostly evaporated. What hasn’t changed is what happens in a packed theater when a crowd screams together. That’s the product he’s actually selling.
“You can watch sports on TV, but it’s not the same as being at the Super Bowl,” he said. “You can watch Coachella on your phone, but you gotta be there. You can pirate it, but you can’t pirate the adrenaline rush.”
The art Roth loves is the stuff that feels like a lunatic made it with no rules. Re-Animator. Evil Dead II. Dawn of the Dead. Cannibal Holocaust, about which he asks the only reasonable question: “Who the fuck thought this was good? Were there any adults on set?”
Now he’s made one of those. On purpose. With his own money.
“Part of what makes great horror is it’s got to be a little bit transgressive,” he said. “There is an element of, is this allowed?”
Ice Cream Man is in theaters now, and Roth wants you to see it there specifically. Every dollar spent on a ticket goes back to the filmmakers, which means it goes toward the next one.
“You can watch it, you can pirate it,” he said, “but you can’t pirate the adrenaline rush.”