ICE CREAM MAN (2026)

Ice Cream Man is the new horror film by Eli Roth, who directs and co-writes alongside Noah Belson. Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) is a nerdy boy who comes to appreciate his lactose intolerance when, after fumbling a baseball game for his team, he’s offered a treat by rival players from the ice cream van operated by our titular villain (Ari Millen). By the next morning, chaos has descended upon Jared’s idyllic small town: the children who partook have turned into homicidal maniacs with unblinking eyes and maws smeared with ice cream.

The ice cream man is an odd figure: mute, smiling, sporting a pencil moustache, and somehow indefinably “foreign”.Jared must escape his mysterious designs, aided by his sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott), her meathead suitor Chris (Dylan Hawco), and a couple of classmates. Will they survive the school day? And what exactly is this dispenser of sickeningly sweet treats?

Ice Cream Man has received negative reviews and pushback from horror fans, to which I can only ask: does no one appreciate trash anymore? It features a human head used for swingball and entrails as a skipping rope—I certainly got my money’s worth. Since so many modern horror films, even slashers, insist on being heavy-handed metaphors for trauma, it’s refreshing to watch unpretentious splatter.

Roth’s pulp fiction isn’t smart or atmospheric by any means; it’s firmly rooted in the pre-Scream (1996) era of slashers, before Wes Craven introduced irony and characterisation to the sub-genre. The plot and dialogue are daft, but the film carries a heedless, self-aware humour. Plus, the ending is actually quite surprising.

It’s definitely better than the 1995 Clint Howard film of the same name that many assumed it was remaking. Directed by Paul Norman—his sole mainstream credit amidst a filmography otherwise comprised of pornography—the original Ice Cream Man saw Howard committing the requisite treat-themed killings. The only bit I fondly recall was a human head placed in a waffle cone like a scoop of ice cream. That’s admittedly one up on Roth’s version, which doesn’t seem to incorporate body parts into the treats, unless I missed a background gag.

(Thinking back, there was a gag involving brains and an ice cream scoop. What I actually missed was the exploration inside the van itself, which Norman’s film delivered with scenes of insects and other nasties crawling through the tubs.)

Themed killings and a sense of self-awareness are all I really expect from a slasher like this. To be fair, Ice Cream Mantreats ice cream as little more than a colourful plot device. The real theme is middle school: the midsection is packed with gags involving classroom microscopes and chalk drawings on the schoolyard asphalt.

Part of the reason the film has proved controversial among horror fans—perhaps the primary reason—is its use of AI. I noticed it in the short, black-and-white musical cartoons that play on characters’ smartphones to herald the arrival of the ice cream man. It’s also used for the insect-themed imagery decorating the van, as well as a flashback montage detailing the villain’s origin story.

In this context, I’m not particularly bothered by Roth’s reliance on AI. If anything, the technology’s innate soullessness enhances the uncanny atmosphere. Whether AI will ever capture the warmth and intimacy of human-crafted animation remains to be seen, but for now, its output strikes me as faintly sinister. Watching these segments gave me a proper chill—which is hardly a bad outcome for a horror film.

As is typical for Roth, the social milieu evokes a small-town 1970s or ’80s setting—not in a warm, nostalgic Steven Spielberg sense, but by leaning into the era’s nastier traits. Roth’s films are usually set in the present, yet his dialogue and character archetypes feel increasingly antiquated, even accounting for the recent rightward shift in global politics and culture. Early splatter efforts like Cabin Fever (2002) and Hostel (2005) were full of “jock” characters tossing around homophobic slurs as casually as prepositions. While the harsher language has been excised here, Ice Cream Man’s child characters still fit dated bully and nerd tropes.

It’s difficult to pinpoint precisely what I mean. To draw a comparison, The Black Phone (2021) was a supernatural horror set among 1970s kids who frequently beat each other up in near-gladiatorial battles. The kids in Ice Cream Man,despite living in an age of smartphones and mindfulness, feel oddly similar. Roth himself turns up on screen as the protagonist’s father, proving to be a better actor than his occasional collaborator Quentin Tarantino, if not as accomplished a filmmaker.

Roth is a core member of the “Splat Pack”, a group of male indie filmmakers who emerged around 2002, producing low-budget, high-violence horror. Scroll through their Wikipedia pages and you’ll find a sea of leathery, middle-aged men with heavy stubble. The line-up includes Alexandre Aja (Haute Tension, Piranha 3D), James Wan and Leigh Whannell (the Saw and Insidious franchises), Rob Zombie (House of 1,000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects), and Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II, III, IV, and Spiral).

Unsurprisingly, given this roster, the group isn’t known for cerebral or aesthetically sophisticated horror—or “elevated horror”, to use that ridiculous term that implies the genre was previously incapable of artistic merit. Even the best of these films, such as the original Saw (2004), prioritise mechanics over character and theme. The rest consist of nearly plotless riffs on earlier works (House of 1,000 Corpses being a Texas Chain Saw derivative), nonsensical slashers (Haute Tension, a bizarre pseudo-adaptation of Dean Koontz’s novel Intensity), and “torture porn”.

Roth came to define this latter sub-genre with his Hostel series. While some entries claim deeper satirical intent (Bousman embarrassingly attempted this with the dismal Spiral), they are fundamentally juvenile crowd-pleasers aimed squarely at gorehounds. They offer grindhouse cinema for generations born long after the original grindhouse theatres closed down. Fittingly, Roth’s best work to date remains Thanksgiving (2023), which expanded upon the fake trailer he directed for the 2007 anthology film Grindhouse.

Ice Cream Man could easily have been another Grindhouse trailer. It fits the Splat Pack’s trashy, juvenile aesthetic perfectly, clocking in under 90 minutes with plenty of themed gore.

USA • CANADA • UK • FRANCE • JAPAN | 2026 | 86 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Eli Roth.
writers: Eli Roth & Noah Belson (story by Eli Roth).
starring: Ari Millen, Charlie Zeltzer, Shiloh O’Reilly, Kaori Mirza Waldman, Sarah Abbott & Benjamin Byron Davis.