It was a really joyous experience

Roth took a swing toward the mainstream with 2023’s Thanksgiving, a festive slasher that still features plenty of gore and some light cannibalism. However, with his latest horror flick, the director is veering back into true degenerate territory with Ice Cream Man. And as a self-proclaimed horror sicko, I couldn’t be happier.

Ice Cream Man takes a simple premise — what if the ice cream man was evil? — and stretches it to absurd extremes. The movie mostly consists of watching the small children of a nondescript American town violently murder their parents, teachers, and any other adults unlucky enough to get in their way. As per usual, Roth delights in finding creative ways to fill the screen with blood and guts, ranging from hacksaw decapitations to death by a hundred pencils impaled in one poor victim’s face.

Ahead of the film’s release from Roth’s new studio, The Horror Section, I caught up with the director for a behind-the-scenes look at how he came up with this bizarre idea, and how he pulled off a movie where child actors play jump rope with someone’s intestines.

1

So what is Ice Cream Man actually about?

Yes, this is a movie where giggling children decapitate their parents while under the spell of cursed ice cream, but what does it mean? After all, the best horror movies often tackle real-world societal issues through the lens of jump scares and blood spatter, and Ice Cream Man is no exception.

For Roth, the initial idea came from simply taking a second look at a random ice cream truck driver, but it wasn’t until years later that it developed into an actual movie.

“When I first had this idea in 2003, it was just this thought of an ice cream man,” Roth says. “I saw an ice cream man and the music just triggered this memory of being a kid in summertime and hearing the ice cream man and running after the ice cream. And then I thought, We don’t know who this dude is. Like this could be a serial killer. Like we just trust ice cream men? And then I was thinking about the way the music was like a Pavlovian response. What if it was like the Pied Piper? What if it was infecting the kids and could control the kids? And then what if it made the kids all kill their parents in the middle of the night? My brain started going and going and going.”

Roth quickly teamed up with Noah Belson (a writer with a small role in Cabin Fever) to nail down a script, but the concept didn’t exactly go over well in Hollywood at the time.

“People read it and went, ‘This is too insane. This is too crazy. And you can’t ask kids to do this stuff,'” Roth recalls. “So I put it down for a number of years. And then being a parent myself — I have a baby girl — all you think about is protecting your child. And you know that no matter what, ultimately something is gonna get to them. You can prepare your kids for the world, but you can’t childproof the world. So there’s this terror as a parent that no matter what you do, no matter what safe environment you build, some evil force can just come in and infect their mind. And what if their child gets turned against you? There’s nothing more terrifying than that.”

Roth continues: “So it was really this kind of primal fear of wanting to protect your child from the evils of the outside world and knowing that ultimately there’s no way you can do that, that really made me wanna make this movie now.”

Ice Cream Man also harnesses another, more modern fear: technology. Throughout the movie, Roth creates visual links between our mobile devices and the brain-controlling ice cream the kids consume (in one early scene, the same kids all seem entranced by an ice cream-related animation playing on their smartphones).

So is Ice Cream Man a commentary on this generation of “iPad kids”? For Roth, these ideas all connect, both in his movie and in the real world.

“Parents aren’t paying attention,” he says. “They’re talking to each other when the kids are on their phones. There’s definitely that feeling that if the phone becomes your babysitter, then this could happen.”

2

Was it difficult to make a horror movie with so many kids?

Image: The Horror Section

Working with child actors is infamously difficult, and the fact that Ice Cream Man has those actors doing some of the most gruesome stuff imaginable likely didn’t make it any easier, right? Turns out, it may have actually helped. Roth says both the kids and their parents were all huge horror fans and came to set excited to see how the blood-soaked sausage gets made.

“They were very into it,” Roth says. “We were super upfront about what we were doing. So even before we cast our main kids, I told the parents about being a father myself — my fears that we can’t protect our kids from the things that come into our community or to their minds — and they got it. They’re all horror fans and movie fans.”

He continues: “When we’re shooting a scene with a hundred extras and 20 stunt people, the parents are all there on set. They have to have visual contact with their child at all times. We told everyone what we were doing, so anyone that showed up — these kids are crazy horror fans. They’ve never seen Terrifier, but they have an Art Crispies backpack. They’ve seen every episode of Walking Dead.”

“And the parents are now younger than me. They grew up with Hostel and Cabin Fever. They’ve all seen Thanksgiving. So I had the parents at the monitor with me going, ‘You know, my son would really love a fake head.’ Or, ‘Can’t you give my daughter a leg?’ Or, ‘She’d love more guts.’ These kids love Halloween. They live for Halloween. The parents were like, ‘My kids love anything scary, anything gory.'”

As for directing the kids, Roth attributes his success to another job he once had before becoming a filmmaker.

“I was a camp counselor, so I like to have a fun energy on set,” he says, while also admitting that the young cast often directed themselves. “As soon as you put out the guts, the kids just start playing jump rope with the guts and start playing tetherball with the head and catch with the heads. Like there was no direction required. Like once the kids are in the monster makeup, they go right into it. They didn’t wanna come out of it. They loved it.”

Roth continues: “I was like, ‘Oh, we should do a blood angel. Who wants to make a blood angel?’ [Ed. note: picture a snow angel, but in a pool of blood.] This girl’s like, ‘I’ll do it. I’ll do it.’ We’re filming in a heat wave, covered in corn syrup and fake blood, but the kids don’t care about being sticky or covered.” They were like, ‘Blood angel, yay!'”

Of course, there were still some speed bumps along the way.

“The tricky part is you gotta break for the kids every 45 minutes,” Roth says. “So we’re getting them out of the gym, and it’s a heat wave, and they’re holding the ice cream, and they have the guts and the blood, and then you have like two minutes to get the shot. But chaos happens because it’s children. So we’re about to shoot, and all the stunt people are like hanging, about to get pulled onto the ground, and I’m like, ‘Action!’ None of the kids were moving. I was like, ‘Let’s go guys. Action. Now, go ahead.’ And one kid’s just standing there with his hand up. I go, ‘Yes?’ And he’s like, ‘My shoes untied.’ And I was like, ‘We’ll wait, go ahead.’ And he goes, ‘Where’s my mommy?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, he doesn’t know how to tie his shoe yet. Can someone…’ And the cast were like, ‘We got it. We’ll tie his shoes.’ And then we got the shot.”

“Or another time, we had all the kids lined up to get the ice cream — 40 minutes getting all the kids there in the makeup, roll camera, and one bee came along, and the kids were like, ‘A bee!’ And the whole scene was over. It was done. Everybody ran. A bee is directing my movie! So I just had to embrace the chaos.”

After all that, Roth says the ultimate reward was realizing that he had helped a new generation of kids understand and appreciate the horror movie genre.

“After the parents said to me, ‘Now we can show them those horror movies that we’ve been waiting to show them because they understand the makeup, the gore, the blood. So when we show them a scary movie, not only do they know it’s not real, but they’re gonna understand how it was made.’ So it was a really joyous experience.”

3

Where did that freaky cartoon come from?

Image: The Horror Section