Eli Roth Bets on Himself With Unrated Horror Film ‘Ice Cream Man’

When Eli Roth was making “Borderlands,” a $120 million adaptation of a popular video game, he felt the movie getting farther and farther away from his punk rock vision.

“As things grow bigger, studios just naturally become more risk averse,” Roth says. “My nature as a filmmaker is to do the thing that’s left of center, because that’s what has worked for me.”

But to earn a PG-13 rating, studio executives pushed for cuts and tweaks, and the finished product was a disaster, bombing with audiences and critics when it opened in 2024.

“You got something that belonged to nobody,” Roth says. “It’s not a kids’ movie, but it’s trying to appeal to everybody. It’s for gamers, but it doesn’t have the violence the gamers want because it can’t be that extreme because it costs too much. You just wind up with a movie that’s neither fish nor fowl.”

That’s not the case with “Ice Cream Man,” which — love it or hate it — is unabashedly Roth’s vision. The director, who made a name for himself directing gorefests like “Hostel” and “The Green Inferno,” is returning to his ultraviolent roots with the story of children who become homicidal maniacs when they devour frozen treats.

“I thought, what if it’s like the Pied Piper, and the ice cream truck music triggers a Pavlovian response?” Roth says. “I had this image of the kids killing their parents and teachers and then eating more and more ice cream.”

And this time Roth won’t be pressured to tone down the carnage. He’s cut out the studio entirely and gone into business for himself. Roth raised the film’s $5.5 million budget mostly through foreign pre-sales and tax credits (it shot in Canada). He will release the picture via The Horror Section, the independent genre company that Roth founded in 2025. The plan is to distribute two to four horror films annually in theaters, keeping budgets low to preserve creative freedom….