Ice cream and horror, at least one particular kind of horror, have something in common. There was a time when industrial ice cream could still be made with real milk fat, dense texture and deep flavor, without requiring a trip to an artisanal shop and 30 shekels for two scoops. Today, too often, it means hydrogenated vegetable fat, stabilizers and a synthetic aftertaste.
Horror movies have undergone a similar decline. Film stock, gallons of fake blood, latex body casts and animatronic creatures have gradually given way to CGI monsters and digitally generated blood splatter. The next deterioration may already be underway as filmmakers begin incorporating artificial intelligence. At that point, the main source of horror may be the uncanny valley itself.
Eli Roth’s “Ice Cream Man” manages to combine both forms of degradation. Roth built his reputation with “Cabin Fever” in 2002 and the “Hostel” films, which helped define the so-called torture-porn wave of the mid-2000s. This time he has made a horror comedy in the splatter tradition, a subgenre built around physical mutilation pushed to absurd extremes.
The story unfolds in a suburban setting designed to evoke an idealized childhood from another era, only to turn that image inside out through a sinister ice cream vendor who transforms children into homicidal zombies.
The first suspicions about Roth’s use of AI emerged after images from the trailer began circulating. The credits also list Dark Half, a company specializing in AI-assisted visual effects. Roth initially denied using AI, saying he had relied on “my background in animation” to create short retro-animation sequences inspired by “The Haunted House,” the 1929 Mickey Mouse short.
A few days ago, however, he acknowledged that he had “not been precise” and that AI had been used in “very small parts of a few scenes.” After watching the film, there is reason to suspect the use may be more substantial, including in a flashback sequence that gives the ice cream vendor a backstory reminiscent of Freddy Krueger.
Alternatively, perhaps the parts that were not made with AI simply adopted the same AI-slop aesthetic. It is difficult to decide which possibility is worse.
The film takes place in Bailin Bay, a pristine, overly polished town suspended somewhere between the 1980s and the present. There are shops that look as though they have existed for a century, children playing baseball, family dinners and conspicuously little 21st-century technology.
Bright lighting and cheerful colors complete the idyllic picture, almost preparing the eye for the colorful ice cream soon to be handed to the children, filled with God knows what.
From 'Ice Cream Man'
(Photo: Courtesy of United King Films)
The protagonist is Jared, played by Charlie Zeltzer, a 12-year-old suburban kid straight out of a Spielberg-era 1980s movie. He is thin, short for his age and routinely humiliated by slightly older bullies. At the beginning of the film, he irritates his baseball teammates when he becomes distracted at a crucial moment in a game.
The distraction is an arriving ice cream truck driven by a mute vendor with a permanently creepy grin, played by Ari Millen. The character design recalls Art the Clown from the “Terrifier” films, though far less effectively.
A repetitive tune draws children toward the truck, hypnotized by the promise of cold, sweet, brightly colored sugar. Jared wants some too, but he has one weakness: lactose intolerance. Even Roth’s demonic ice cream vendor, apparently, refuses to use vegetable fat.
Jared’s older sister Lizzie, played by Sarah Abbott, stops him from taking the fateful lick. She does taste the ice cream herself, but as the film later establishes, its psychoactive effect weakens with age.
We also meet Jared’s parents, his lawyer father, played by Roth himself, and his mother, played by Karen Cliche, during a long family dinner scene whose main purpose seems to be ensuring that viewers remember they exist before they vanish for most of the movie.
From 'Ice Cream Man'
(Photo: Courtesy of United King Films)
The trailer makes the film’s trajectory perfectly clear: a procession of grotesque mutilations committed by children against adults, many of them teachers and other school staff. A neck is cut with a saw. A dentist’s drill goes into an ear. The top of a skull is sliced open and the victim is fed his own brain from an ice cream cup. Classic zombies usually have blood smeared around their mouths with bits of chewed flesh.
Roth substitutes colorful ice cream and sprinkles. Scenes of children crowding doors borrow imagery from George A. Romero’s zombie films. There is also an extended homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” particularly the famous sequence that slowly builds tension ahead of an attack.
Roth more or less copies it, but in a way that mainly highlights how limited his understanding of Hitchcock’s suspense mechanics appears to be.
The killer-child trope is hardly new. It stretches from the blond alien children of “Village of the Damned” in 1960, through the acclaimed Spanish horror film “Who Can Kill a Child?” from 1976, to “Children of the Corn” in 1984, adapted from Stephen King.
One American critic neatly dubbed Roth’s film “Children of the Cornetto.” Even Michael Haneke’s masterful “The White Ribbon” from 2009 can be considered a realistic variation on the same trope. The question is what justifies returning to such an extreme image.
Perhaps it is effective terror. Perhaps it reflects contemporary anxieties. Perhaps, as with Haneke, it carries a social or historical dimension. With Roth, it amounts to little more than the realization of what feel like childhood fantasies about children tearing adults apart.
At the end of Zach Cregger’s excellent 2025 horror film “Weapons,” there is a cathartic moment in which children tear apart the witch Aunt Gladys, prompting cheers from the audience. Roth appears to have decided that the effect would work even better if 80% of his own film consisted of variations on the same idea.
From 'Ice Cream Man'
(Photo: Courtesy of United King Films)
Instead of becoming a justified climax, mutilation becomes routine. I suffered through “Ice Cream Man,” though not for the reasons a horror filmmaker might hope.
To be fair, opinions differ. The critical consensus has been brutal, but there are still critics with independent minds. One such colleague sitting behind me laughed throughout the screening. To each his own. Those who seemed genuinely distressed were the members of Israel’s Film Review Board, responsible for age classifications.
In a July 22, 2026 decision, the board barred viewers under 18 from seeing “Ice Cream Man.” It ruled that placing horrific acts within familiar elements of childhood “creates continuing anxiety and a severe response among minors, because it harms their sense of security in their natural surroundings.”
Experts not only in film, apparently, but in child psychology as well. Obviously, the film is not recommended for children. But it is difficult to believe that teenagers who willingly choose to watch it would suffer lasting harm.
The monotonous plot, mediocre direction and synthetic visual design leave “Ice Cream Man” as little more than a bloody, tasteless prank. To suggest the film could produce a “continuing and severe response” is to credit it with qualities that are nowhere to be found.
If authorities insist on justifying a ban, perhaps they should do so on different grounds: damage to the purity of cinema through artificial intelligence.