Few directors in modern genre history have shaped the landscape of blood-curdling terror quite like Eli Roth. From the infectious dread of Cabin Fever to the visceral slasherfest of Hostel and Thanksgiving, the horror filmmaker has built a career honoring the golden eras of horror while pushing practical FX and tension to their limits. Now, Roth is back with his most unhinged project yet: the chilling suburban slasher film, Ice Cream Man played by Ari Millen.

In this Eli Roth interview, we sit down with the write/ director to discuss the more than two decades-long journey behind bringing his Ice Cream Man movie to life. Set in an idyllic suburban neighborhood where a sinister ice cream vendor turns tasty summer treats into a terrifying catalyst for violence, the film stands as a masterclass in nostalgic horror twisted into mayhem. It’s all in service to a central theme – the innocence of children in a not so innocent place.

We explore how Eli Roth makes horror movies that linger long after the credits roll, digging into the specific Eli Roth Ice Cream Man influences that fueled the project. From 1980s slasher classics and insane Italian Giallo thrillers to vintage EC Comics and practical body horror, Roth breaks down the cinematic components that inspires his work.

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How did the story come together from initial concept to finished film?

The initial seed happened years ago.

I was promoting Cabin Fever in the summer of 2003, when I saw an ice cream truck. It was the summertime. I heard that music. I saw all the kids running. I remembered in the 80s, in the suburbs of Boston, hearing that song and just running out. You’re in a swimming pool, you’re playing kickball, and you go up to the ice cream man and get your treat.

We don’t know who this ice cream man is. What if this person infected the kids in some way? What if the infection made the kids wake up in the middle of the night when they hear the music, and they all start killing their parents, all the adults, and going crazy?

There’s this inherent trust with an ice cream man. I wrote the script with my friend Noah Belson. For years, people said, “You can’t make this movie. It’s too sick. It’s too violent. You’ll never get it past the ratings board.”

You can’t ask children to do these things. I’d respond, “Well, the kids are never in danger. The adults are in danger.”

Every time Roth pitched a new project he’d bring up Ice Cream Man and got the same negative response. Nobody wants to see a horror movie with kids.

What about It? What about Stranger Things? Audiences don’t care if it’s kids. They care if it’s great characters, great kills, and great horror. It was really Terrifier 3 that kicked the door in for unrated horror movies.

I thought, now I could make Ice Cream Man, and I could release it theatrically around the world the way they did. That’s why I started my company The Horror Section, and this is the first movie.

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Discuss the visceral horror in Ice Cream Man.

I wanted kills that were fun, but also kills where kids aren’t just taking a gun and shooting.

That has different connotations. I wanted more creative kills.

The film is all about the perversion of childhood. We start off with kids playing jump rope, and then you see them jump rope with intestines.

They’re playing pin the tail on the donkey, and then they pin the tail on the teacher with a knife. It’s taking things that you could normally find at school, and using those as weapons. It’s all the things that we never think to use as a weapon.

It’s not just that they chop a hand off with a paper cutter. It’s that they then play tag with it. The kids are still kids.

I started that in Hostel, where the kids beat the guys to death with bricks and bash up the car. And then one kid wants a piece of bubble gum, and he’s says to him, “Here’s your reward. Here’s the bubble gum.”

It was such a fun moment, such a real moment with kids, that in Hostel 2, I had them playing soccer with a head, and then the kid kicks a goal, and puts his shirt over his head, and says, “Goal!” It is so ridiculous, but it’s also real in a very strange and bizarre way.

I wanted kills that people had never seen before.

There was nothing that didn’t make it in Ice Cream Man. Anything that’s in it, you want the audience thinking what happens next. They can be dreading it. They’re  afraid to see it, but they still want to know.

If you’re too repulsive, then you’ve lost them. If you go too far and they feel like you’ve tricked them, you’ve crossed the line.

You want people to say, “Oh my God, that’s so shocking, but I want to see what happens next.”

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How would you pitch Ice Cream Man?

For me, it was Bad News Bears meets The Children, the film from 1980. It’s The Birds, but with kids.

But then, as soon as the trailer went live, someone in a comment wrote, “This is Weapons in a waffle cone.”

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Discuss the big reveal about the origin of the Ice Cream Man.

I think you’re taking a risk any time you stop the movie to give backstory. But at that point, we’re so exhausted by what we’ve seen, it’s got the pace of a zombie movie, that we need a breath.

I felt after the middle of the movie was the right moment to start to explain what was going on, and why it was happening. You really needed a great actor to do it, and Benjamin Byron Davis, who plays the priest, is an actor I love. He’s in Red Dead Redemption 2. I’ve also worked with him in Borderlands.

If you’re going to give a scene like that to someone, you need an actor like Ben that can pull it off. Our main cast, Shiloh O’Reilly, Kiori Mirza Waldman, Charlie Zeltzer, and Charlie Storey, are such good actors that I felt like you can only get away with that if you make the biug reveal visually interesting.

It was fun to do that, but it’s a bit of a risk. The movie, structurally, is kind of insane. I wanted people to think they knew where the movie was going, and then stop, and almost get frustrated by it, and then it continues, but it also pays off later.

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What is Ice Cream Man saying about children today?

I’m a father of a 17-month-old baby girl, so even though I wrote the script 20 years ago, and I was thinking about the ice cream man and the kids going crazy back then. I’m approaching it from a very different point of view now.

I looked at the script and rewrote it from the point of view of being a parent, and everything is about protecting your child.

There are all these things you want to do to protect your child, and ultimately, you can’t. You can only prepare them for the world. Now, with YouTube and phones, if there’s an idea, it can infect your kid.

We can have no screens in our house, but it doesn’t matter. At some point, my daughter’s going to go to school, and there’ll be someone there with a screen. There’ll be some idea that gets in her head. This is a very primal fear of something being turned against you. There’s this inherent trust with the ice cream man coming to town, that’s broken.

We trust people in uniform. So, it’s taking that idea and having someone who violates that, is really scary.

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Ice Cream Man runs at 86 minutes. How did you ensure a trim length?

We’ll shoot a lot of dialogue and kind of let it run, because I don’t like my dialogue to sound like movie dialogue.

I want it to sound more natural. When we’re at the dinner scene, I want it to feel like a family dinner. For me, E.T. is the best dinner scene in the movie. The way they’re all talking over each other.

Goodfellas, after they’ve buried Billy Bats, when they go to Tommy’s (Joe Pesci) mom’s for dinner, is one of my favorites.

You want to get in at the latest moment possible and out at the earliest moment possible. It’s just discipline. There’s a certain amount of days you have to shoot this and a certain amount of time especially with the children on set.

Dialogue is the cheapest thing to shoot, so sometimes you can try stuff and let the kids go and see what happens. Then you can decide later in the editing. But I really try to write it tight. This is my tenth movie, so every movie I write, I try to improve as a screenwriter. I think of myself as an editor while I’m writing  now.

I’m picturing myself in the edit, shooting it, planning it. If this is going to be really expensive, I want to make sure it’s going to be in the movie.