Eli Roth is known for his nasties. In Cabin Fever (2002), Marcy, infected, shaves off her own leg. In Hostel (2005), Josh is systematically tortured, his Achilles tendons severed. In Hostel: Part II (2007), Heather, suspended upside down, is cut to pieces with a scythe by a woman who bathes in her blood. In The Green Inferno (2013), Jonah is butchered alive by cannibals who gobble up his eyeballs and tongue. In Thanksgiving (2023), Kathleen is roasted alive in an industrial oven and served up like a turkey to her friends.
You get the gist. As a director, Roth loves this stuff. As an actor, he appeared as “the Bear Jew” in his friend Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, beating a Nazi to death with a baseball bat. As an activist, he posted, after Greta Thunberg claimed last year to have been kidnapped from the Gaza flotilla, “She needs to be eaten by cannibals.” Alive, ça va sans dire.
At fan festivals like Comic Con, Roth is unrepentantly gleeful about pushing the horror boundaries ever further, eager to outdo not only his own previous best but also the achievements of rival director Damien Leone, the creator of Art the Clown and the Terrifier series. To that end, Roth has founded a new media company of his own: The Horror Section. Ice Cream Man is its first production, released unrated in the US.
Ice Cream Man is a sick version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. An old-fashioned ice cream van drives into the park of a prosperous suburban town, Bayleen Bay, just as the summer holidays loom. Everything about it is slightly off, from the discordant music it plays to the grinning, wordless man (Ari Millen) serving up, but the kids pile in. Every one of them eating the ice cream becomes a murderous zombie, eyes blank, lips smeared. When the ice cream van drives around the streets playing its jangly tune that night, the kids are activated. They gleefully murder their sleeping (at first, anyway) parents. A little girl cuts off her mother’s head with a bow saw (such an underrated tool in arboriculture). A dentist is drilled to death with his own instruments. Another father, after having his hand mangled in the waste disposal grinder, is burned alive. Bodies are playfully dismembered.
In the morning, the kids head to school, weirdly inert as they sit, blood-stained, in class for the last day of term. “Is there some sort of zombie pyjama day challenge?” one teacher daftly asks. Then the van rolls up, playing its jingle-jangle, the man hands out more ice creams, and carnage erupts. A teacher is energetically cut in half with a fire axe, her intestines becoming a fun skipping rope. A man loses his hand to a paper guillotine and the hand is used for a jubilant game of tag. On it goes. Living brains are removed from a halved skull with an ice-cream scoop. The police and firemen arrive and they too are carved to pieces.
Only a few kids haven’t eaten the ice cream. Nerdy little Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) is lactose intolerant; his bossy sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) snatches the deadly cone from his hand and chucks up her own (“I’m a girl – of course I know how to make myself vomit”). A small band of still-normal kids is pursued by the zombies, but they soon realise that what the zombies want is to make them eat the ice cream too, not to kill them as they do the adults. For there is a backstory to this, of course: the demonic ice cream man is seeking vengeance for having been falsely accused of abusing children long ago in this town…
So there we are. Be sure to take a Cornetto in with you. Maybe a sick bag, too. Eli Roth’s own explanation for why he liked this story makes no sense at all. He says he chose it because having children himself made him realise that as a parent “all you think of is protecting your child”. But these children, evil without knowing it, are the perpetrators, not the victims; harmful, not harmed themselves. Is it really every parent’s fear that their children will turn homicidal on them, rather than be at risk themselves? It seems so, for Roth. He enthuses that the hundred children he herded on set (“It’s like The Birds with kids”) were all Walking Dead fans and just loved the gore. Perhaps only Americans can understand.
For rather more thought-provoking independent horror this summer, there’s the extraordinary Backrooms and the terrifically well executed Obsession, produced for just $750,000 but already grossing $458m, such is its mainline into the dating nightmares of Gen Z. Coming up soon: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Horror can be intelligent, too, as well as nasty.
Ice Cream Man is in cinemas now
[Further reading: On the Sea: a romantic delirium]