Eli Roth, the director of mediocre shlocker flicks like Hostel and Cabin Fever, as well as 2024’s colossal flop Borderlands, is back with a self-made, self-funded gory horror called Ice Cream Man. It’s about a guy who sells ice creams to children that turn them into killers. Sounds amazing. Anyway, in a recent interview with Polygon he was asked if he used any genAI when creating the movie’s animated sequences. Nope! he said, he’d hand-drawn it himself. But now this AI-free claim has rather been called into question, and he’s given a follow-up statement to Polygon admitting that he “misspoke.”
You know how when your mom asked if you’d tidied your room, and you said sure, absolutely, and then only when she checked later on would you discover you’d misspoken? That’s the situation director Eli Roth appears to be in, regarding the creation of the Fleischer-like old-timey animated characters that appear on kids’ phones in his latest critical flop.
In Ice Cream Man, the children eat the ice creams, become possessed, and are then triggered into killing by a Cuphead-like cartoon that appears on their phones. Polygon‘s Jake Kleinman spoke to Roth at a presser for the movie, and asked how this animation was achieved given the film’s very low budget, specifically querying if genAI had been involved. “I have an animation background and I drew it,” Roth told the reporter. “I worked with an animation team and I wanted it to look and feel like [a] jittery style of the animation.” And how? “I drew the loop cycles and the styles. Then I had some animators help kind of make it a little more fluid, and I worked with an artist to give it a bit of an old-timey jittery feel.” So no genAI at all? “I sat there and I drew out the frames that I wanted, and I tried to match the style of the 1920s haunted Mickey Mouse cartoons.”
Impressive stuff! Also, it seems, perhaps not the full story.
It turns out, a preview version of the movie sent to reviewers listed AI visual effects company Dark Half in the credits, leading many to ponder where their anti-talents would otherwise have been applied. So Polygon followed up with Roth and received the following statement:
I misspoke. AI was used in a very small portion of a few scenes in the film. It was an opportunity where technology and creativity came together to help bring my vision for the film to life.
It’s important to note that Roth has very carefully not specifically mentioned the animated sequences in this response, and follow-up inquiries from Polygon have gone without response, but given the cartoons were the only context in which the director did speak about AI, it suggests this could be the area about which he misspoke. It’s very likely true that Roth drew it, and that animators worked on it, but it seems dubious at this point that he told the entire story. Which seems an odd choice.
We’ve reached out to Dark Half to ask the company if it could let us know which aspects of the movie it worked on.
