Ice Cream Man

There’s something almost perversely logical about director and co-screenwriter Eli Roth turning an ice cream truck into an instrument of terror. Few sounds evoke childhood as instantly as that distant electronic melody drifting through a neighborhood on a hot afternoon, promising sugar, freedom, and the chance to convince a parent to give us a few dollars. Ice Cream Man takes this reassuring ritual and infects it with impressive enthusiasm. In the picture-perfect town of Bayleen Bay, summer vacation is approaching, kids are playing baseball, and everything seems staged to resemble an idealized American childhood. Then a vintage truck appears, driven by a disconcertingly silent vendor played by Ari Millen, and the local kids eagerly devour his icy treats with suspicious-sounding names. As night falls, those same kids wake up with dry ice around their mouths and a sudden urge to murder adults. The only exception is Jared, played by Charlie Zeltzer, whose lactose intolerance unexpectedly becomes the most useful condition ever attributed to a horror movie protagonist. It’s a wonderfully ridiculous premise, and Eli Roth understands that the worst possible approach would have been to treat it with solemnity.

What follows is essentially just a reimagining of the Pied Piper legend by someone who grew up on video-rental horror movies, EC Comics, and liters of movie fake blood. Jared joins Mia, played by Kiori Mirza Waldman, who remains unflappable, and Tommy, played by Shiloh O’Reilly, while his older sister Lizzie, played by Sarah Abbott, and her persistent ex-boyfriend Chris, played by Dylan Hawco, find themselves trapped in this nightmare that quickly escalates. The screenplay by Eli Roth and Noah Belson wisely takes the time to present Bayleen Bay as an exaggeratedly idyllic sanctuary of suburban normalcy before tearing it apart. This contrast is essential: sun-drenched streets, Little League games, family dinners, and children rushing toward an ice cream truck make up the visual vocabulary of a nostalgic America before the film transforms playground equipment, gardening tools, and school supplies into elements of an increasingly grotesque arsenal. We even witness a playful reinterpretation of the famous schoolyard suspense sequence from The Birds, except that Alfred Hitchcock’s birds have actually been replaced by children. It is both a cinephile’s joke and a concise illustration of the film’s central idea: here, nothing has physically invaded childhood; it is childhood itself that has become the threat.

The film’s greatest asset, however, is actor Ari Millen, who plays the ice cream man. He hardly needs any dialogue, as his face speaks volumes. With his impeccable uniform, thin mustache, and frozen smile, his character, the Ice Cream Man, looks like a figure straight out of an old commercial one who has spent decades learning to hate those who looked at him. Ari Millen never pushes his character toward frenzied theatricality; what makes him so unsettling is precisely his composure. He observes, serves, and smiles as chaos unfolds around him, lending his performance a physicality worthy of silent film that contrasts beautifully with the noisy excess prevailing elsewhere. Charlie Zeltzer, Kiori Mirza Waldman, and Shiloh O’Reilly form an endearing trio of survivors precisely because they still behave like recognizable children rather than miniature action heroes, while Sarah Abbott delivers some of the film’s funniest physical comedy scenes when the contaminated ice has a distinctly different effect on the teenagers. Benjamin Byron Davis, playing a priest who knows far more about Bayleen Bay than anyone else, eventually makes an appearance to add a touch of supernatural mythology, and even Eli Roth steps in front of his own camera to play Jared and Lizzie’s father.

No one, however, will walk out of Ice Cream Man talking about restraint. As soon as the carnage begins, Eli Roth tackles practical gore like a chef who’s just discovered that the kitchen never closes. The school sequence becomes the film’s centerpiece, a wild catalog of dismemberments in which ordinary childhood objects are constantly repurposed to commit atrocities. The key distinction is that the violence is intentionally caricatured rather than realistically cruel. Black-and-white animated sequences offer a glimpse into how the possessed children perceive their actions, transforming the carnage into the visual language of an old cartoon, while the practical prosthetics work by Steve Newburn and Adrien Morot lends the film a palpable ugliness that digital blood could never replicate as effectively. At its peak, the result resembles a live-action nightmare imagined by a child who was allowed to stay up far too late: at once repulsive, funny, and inventive. Watching the film also seems essential. The laughter that follows a particularly outrageous murder is partly due to amusement and partly to collective disbelief that the filmmakers actually brought this idea to the screen.

It is precisely in this excess that the film Ice Cream Man begins to undermine itself. A shocking image loses some of its impact when another one pops up a few seconds later, followed by yet another, and then yet another. Eli Roth is in such a hurry to string together new displays of special effects that the suspense gradually gives way to mere showmanship. The first bursts of violence are truly gripping, as they shatter the film’s carefully constructed innocence; by the middle of the film, however, we begin to anticipate the outcome as soon as an adult and a household object appear in the same shot. The screenplay also reduces many of its adult characters to mere potential victims, which weakens the emotional impact of their deaths, while the young protagonists are endearing but lack sufficient character depth. This is where the film seems less polished than Thanksgiving: the latter successfully used its grotesque scenes to serve a more satisfying slasher narrative, whereas Ice Cream Man at times feels like a succession of exceptionally elaborate special effects in search of a unifying thread. The mythology at the end is amusingly complex, but it comes with such a profusion of explanations that the film itself seems aware of how absurd its own rules have become.

However, dismissing Ice Cream Man on the grounds that it lacks psychological depth would mean missing the point of what Eli Roth is deliberately trying to achieve. This is proudly scandalous B-movie cinema, whose spirit is closer to discovering a trashy VHS cover in the back of a video rental store than to the current trend of horror conceived as an elegant metaphor for trauma. The interesting idea behind all this gore is simpler: adults idealize childhood because memory erases its cruelty, while children are expected to trust institutions, their parents, and seemingly harmless strangers. The Ice Cream Man breaks this contract. His truck is appealing because entire generations have been conditioned to associate it with pleasure; the danger doesn’t disguise itself as something scary, but takes the form of nostalgia. The film never explores this notion as deeply as it could, and the attempts to explain the vendor’s past end up making him a little less mysterious, but this idea gives the gore film more depth than a completely arbitrary massacre would. It also explains why Ari Millen, with his perpetual smile, remains more unsettling when he stands perfectly still than many of the film’s most elaborate mutilations.

The film Ice Cream Man thus gives the impression that Eli Roth is rediscovering the mischievous filmmaker who prefers to provoke audiences rather than behave in a respectable manner. At 86 minutes, the film moves at a brisk pace, displays a joyful absurdity, and knows exactly who its target audience is—even when its relentless carnage eventually becomes numbing. It’s neither the director’s most sophisticated work nor his scariest, and viewers looking for carefully developed characters or sustained suspense may find surprisingly little substance beneath all the gory gags. But as a deliberately tacky horror comedy, it possesses a contagious, DIY energy, a formidable main monster embodied by Ari Millen, several memorably over-the-top practical effects sequences, and a delightful refusal to clean up its own mess. There’s something almost admirable about a film coming out in 2026 with such primal ambitions: to make people laugh, make them jump, and ensure that the sound of an ice cream truck seems a little less innocent the next time it drives past their house. Stick around until the end credits for one last touch of very dark humor.

Ice Cream Man
Directed by Eli Roth
Written by Eli Roth, Noah Belson
Story by Eli Roth
Produced by Eli Roth, Kate Harrison Karman, Christopher Woodrow, Raj Singh
Starring  Ari Millen, Charlie Zeltzer, Shiloh O'Reilly, Kiori Mirza Waldman, Sarah Abbott, Benjamin Byron Davis
Cinematography : Simon Shohet
Edited by Matt Lyon
Music by Brandon Roberts
Production companies : The Horror Section, MCT Studios
Distributed by Iconic Events Releasing (United States)
Release date : August 7, 2026 (United States)
Running time : 86 minutes

Viewed on September 28, 2026