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Since his debut feature Cabin Fever in 2002, Eli Roth has built a reputation for weaponizing audience discomfort, pushing the boundaries of explicit violence in horror. His Hostel films codified an entire subgenre — torture porn, as critics branded it — and The Green Inferno‘s focus on cannibal savagery drew comparisons to the most notorious exploitation films of the 1970s. Even his comparatively restrained 2023 holiday slasher Thanksgiving delivered enough gore to reaffirm his status as one of the genre’s most extreme voices. After a disastrous detour with the video game adaptation Borderlands, Roth is returning to theaters with Ice Cream Man, an original horror film two decades in the making that the director himself is billing as the most terrifying thing he has ever put on screen.
The trailer revolves around Ari Millen’s titular ice cream man, a smiling vendor who spreads candy-colored joy to the children of a suburban community. The ice cream the children consume, however, gives them more than a sugar rush, as they soon are compelled to do horrific things. The small taste the trailer offers underlines how Roth is at the top of his gory game and willing to make the most of the movie’s unrated nature. For instance, we get multiple scenes of kips chopping limbs, sewing heads, and even scooping the brains out of a live man.
Despite the Title, Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man Is an Original Story
Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man is a fully original story, despite that being the title of other cult horror productions. The most recognizable is the 1995 direct-to-video black comedy horror directed by Norman Apstein, in which Clint Howard plays Gregory Tudor, a man traumatized as a child after witnessing his beloved ice cream vendor gunned down. Tudor grows up to reopen the business, now grinding human flesh into his frozen recipes and terrorizing the local children who eventually band together to bring him down. Ice Cream Man is also a celebrated ongoing horror anthology from Image Comics, co-created by writer W. Maxwell Prince and artist Martín Morazzo. That series follows a supernatural entity named Rick, who often appears disguised as an ice cream vendor.
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Roth’s Ice Cream Man is neither a remake of the movie nor an adaptation of the comics. Instead, the upcoming film is a fully original screenplay, co-written with Noah Belson, centered on a quiet suburban community that begins unraveling after the visit of the titular character. “I’ve had this idea for a long, long time, and studios were too afraid of my early drafts,” Roth said about Ice Cream Man when the movie was announced. “Now’s the time to push the envelope farther than I ever have with what I think will be my most terrifying and insane film to date.” Given his filmography, that is a bold statement, but the production of Ice Cream Man seems to confirm it.
Roth co-founded The Horror Section label specifically to bypass the gatekeeping that kept this script in a drawer. In other words, when studios and producers decided that Roth’s idea was too extreme, he created a company just to bring the movie into theaters. Ice Cream Man is now set for an unrated wide theatrical release across more than 2,000 North American screens.
The Ice Cream Man is scheduled to hit theaters on August 7, 2026.
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