More than 20 years after first imagining the film, Eli Roth has finally brought one of his wildest and bloodiest ideas to the silver screen.
When Roth appeared on the cover of SWAGGER in August 2025, Ice Cream Man was still a project he had spent decades trying to make. Not long afterward, we joined him on set in Toronto and watched that long-held idea finally begin to take shape.
Now, the wait is almost over. Ice Cream Man arrives in theatres on August 7.
“It’s nice when it all works out,” Roth tells SWAGGER. “It was a lot of work, but I’m very, very thrilled with how it came together. I think we had the most incredible cast. I really think we have something unique. There’s nothing quite like it,” he adds with a smile.
Roth is no stranger to carrying an idea for years before finding the right moment to make it. His smash hit Thanksgiving followed a similarly long road from its inception to the screen. “This is one of those ones, like Thanksgiving, where I feel like it was worth the wait,” he says.
Even after decades immersed in horror, Roth still lights up at the possibility of creating something he has never seen before.
“I always want to come up with something I’ve never seen before,” he says. “I’ve watched every horror movie, and I get so excited when I go, ‘Oh, I can’t believe I didn’t think of that,’ or, ‘Whoa, I’ve never seen that before.’”
In Ice Cream Man, that meant designing kills that begin with a familiar setup before turning in an entirely unexpected direction. “I didn’t want kills people have seen before,” he says. “I wanted to do stuff where people think they know what they’re going to get, and they get it in a completely different way.”
“Horror movies should be transgressive and cross lines and break boundaries, but also make you cringe and want to see what happens next,” he continues. “I love movies that are just totally unhinged, where you go, ‘I can’t believe someone did this.’”
After carrying the original idea of Ice Cream Man for more than 20 years, simply knowing the finished film now exists carries its own sense of satisfaction for Roth. “I was making this movie like, ‘You know what? If I never get to make another movie, if I die tomorrow, at least this one exists,’” Roth says.
Although the concept had been with him since early in his career, Roth believes he needed the experience of making films such as Cabin Fever, Hostel and Thanksgiving before he could execute it properly. “I could never have made this movie had I not made all those other films,” he explains.
Watch Eli Roth’s SWAGGER interview:
His life outside filmmaking changed the story, too. Since first imagining Ice Cream Man, Roth became a father, giving him a more personal understanding of the instinct to protect a child from a world that cannot always be controlled.
“I felt like it was sort of the maturity as a filmmaker, but also being a parent,” Roth says. “Being a father to a baby girl and thinking about all the things you want to protect your child from. Knowing that no matter what, something will get to them at some point and there’s nothing you can do about it,” he adds. “That’s terrifying as a father.”
Roth also steps in front of the camera as the father of the film’s central family, bringing that perspective into his performance. The same sense of maturity shaped the way he led the production behind the camera.
“The voice I’m using now is how I direct on set,” he says. “It’s just like, plan it out. I know I got it. And if we don’t have it, I know we’re going to figure it out.”
SWAGGER saw that calm confidence firsthand during the Toronto set visit. Roth remained focused on every detail, but the atmosphere never felt weighed down by the scale of what he was attempting. He gave clear direction, treated the cast and crew with the utmost respect and kept the production moving without losing the fun of making it.
Maintaining that playful atmosphere was especially important with so many young actors involved. “The kids don’t know they’re doing anything evil. They think that this is fun,” Roth says. He adds that the children and their parents were horror fans who understood the material from the start.
“The parents are going, ‘Can you give my daughter more blood?’” Roth recalls. “The kids would come up to me and go, ‘Do you want me to have more blood?’ I go, ‘Do you want more blood?’ They go, ‘Yeah.’ I go, ‘Go get more blood.’”
“It was like, ‘Sir, may I have more blood, please?’” he adds with a smile. “It was joyous.”
That playfulness extends into the film’s visual identity. Roth looked to his own memories of childhood summers rather than the dark, desaturated imagery that has become common in modern horror. “My memories of childhood are like green grass and blue skies in summertime and the classic blue and white ice cream truck,” he says. “I wanted it to look beautiful, like The Bad News Bears or Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”
Bright primary colours give the film an innocence that Roth can gradually tear apart. “I shot it in these very primary colours, bright and colourful and beautiful, that then just gets saturated with blood,” he continues. “It all goes to hell. It’s taking this beautiful memory of childhood and just painting it red.”
For Roth, the approach was also a chance to push against horror conventions he had grown tired of seeing. “I feel like a lot of horror movies look the same,” he says. “You start to watch it and it’s all in these kind of muted tones and it’s overly dark. I’m starting to get bored of that. I wanted to kind of break the rules of what you’re supposed to do in a horror film.”
When SWAGGER asked Roth to describe the finished film in only three words, he did not hesitate.
“Unhinged. Sugar rush. Insanity,” he says with a smile.
More than 20 years after Roth first imagined it, Ice Cream Man arrives in theatres on August 7, featuring original music by Snoop Dogg. Tickets are available here.
