Ever since the flesh-eating virus in “Cabin Fever” started peeling off Cerina Vincent’s skin as she shaved her legs, Eli Roth has been a director synonymous with ingeniously gory set pieces. From the castration by scissors in “Hostel: Part II” to the holiday dinner from hell in “Thanksgiving,” Roth has become our most reliable filmmaker for crafting revolting, hilarious, and completely original horror imagery.
But Roth has really topped himself with his latest film, “Ice Cream Man,” a horror-comedy so exuberant and gleeful in its excess that it makes early Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson movies look like “My Dinner With Andre.” The story, in which the title character infects an entire town’s children with murderous impulses via the unique properties of his addictive ice cream treats, is essentially just a pretext for Roth to come up with the wildest, funniest, and scariest kills he’s ever put on screen.
The movie’s pièce de résistance is a massive massacre sequence in which an entire school of kids turns on the adults in their lives, killing their parents and teachers by using every school supply in sight as a lethal weapon. It’s the splatter movie equivalent of the opening sequence in “Saving Private Ryan” (though much funnier), with dozens upon dozens of violent incidents meticulously choreographed by Roth to build into a sustained orgy of awe-inspiring carnage.
Appropriately, Steven Spielberg’s 1998 war epic was one of the influences Roth turned to when figuring out how to execute his sequence. “ I thought about Spielberg talking about ‘Saving Private Ryan,’” Roth told IndieWire. “Going, ‘I don’t know how we’re gonna do this, but here we’re gonna get to the wall. Now we’re storming the beach. Now they’re on the beach, and they go off from here to there.’”
Roth approached “Ice Cream Man” similarly, building the sequence one step at a time as he walked around the location and thought about what could happen where, and why. Once he had the basic arc of the sequence mapped out, he filled it in with as many unique ways of kids killing adults as he could imagine — at times calling on his own childhood memories.
“I went to school in seventh grade with a fake hand I brought to art class,” Roth said. “I scrunched my real hand up in a sweatshirt and asked the teacher a question, and while I was talking I slammed down the paper cutter on the fake hand. He screamed and almost had a heart attack.” When Roth was conceptualizing the massacre sequence for “Ice Cream Man,” he built on the paper cutter idea and had kids play tag with the severed hand, which bestowed almost magical powers on its possessor.
“That builds to another thing, which builds to another, and you just slowly build one gag at a time,” Roth said. The biggest challenge of creating his pre-teen bloodbath was the time in which he had to do it: one day. “It was insane,” Roth said, noting that one of the most indelible images of the film, in which an army of psychotic children pound on the walls of a glass hallway, was shot in one take. “There was some scheduling snafu, and I only had two minutes to shoot it with a hundred kids before I started losing the kids. So I did one shot handheld and told everybody, ‘Guys, we can’t rehearse. Just go.’”
Roth shot the entire feature in 19 days, a tight schedule for a film as ambitious as “Ice Cream Man” but one that Roth feels gives the movie an energy that transfers to the audience. “ At the time I thought, ‘Why do I do this to myself? I should’ve given myself more time,’” Roth said. “We’re shooting in an elementary school with children, and we’ve got maybe 10 days that the school’s available. It’s August, there’s no air conditioning. But there’s something about moving at a certain speed where you don’t overthink stuff. You start to go by instinct.”
Roth and his second unit director, Justin Harding, created three-dimensional storyboards for the film using FrameForge, a software that enabled Harding to build a digital replica of the school that Roth and his department heads could then use to design their shots mathematically, figuring out where each camera needed to be at any given moment to capture the action Roth envisioned. The extensive prep helped Roth maintain a fun atmosphere on set in spite of the time pressures — something that was key to getting the best out of his cast of child actors.
“It was Christmas and Halloween for them every day,” Roth said. “The kids in the movie have been liberated. It’s like they’re opening their presents. They’re opening the teacher’s chest cavity and playing jump rope, only they’re doing it with intestines.” Roth had extensive conversations with all the parents ahead of time to make sure they understood what the movie was and were on board. “I was very clear with the parents about what we were doing, and the ones that weren’t on board were weeded out before we ever started shooting.”
Most of the parents who let their kids sign on were huge horror fans themselves, as were the kids. “These kids have seen everything,” Roth said. “They all watch ‘Walking Dead,’ and even if they haven’t seen ‘Terrifier,’ they have Art the Clown backpacks. So they understand that it’s all just make-believe, and once you put the makeup on them, they didn’t want to take it off. The kids would come to me and say, ‘May I have more blood, please?’ The parents have to have visual eye contact with their children at all times, so they’re at the monitor with me saying, ‘I think my daughter would love a fake head.’”
Roth says that his past as a camp counselor came in handy when directing the kids, though for the most part he didn’t alter his approach to creating an environment in which his actors could flourish. “ I said to them, ‘Do you want me to direct you as children or as adults?’ and they said, ‘Adults.’ I said, ‘OK, I’m not going to swear, but the way I direct Cate Blanchett or Jack Black or Ana de Armas, that’s how I’m going to talk to you. This is how you’ll be directed. If something’s not working, we’re gonna change it.’”
Roth sees “Ice Cream Man” not only as a movie about and starring kids but a movie for kids — and indeed, for a certain kind of child it will probably become an instant all-time favorite. “If I was 10 and I saw this, I’d think it was the greatest movie ever made,” Roth said. “That’s why we’re releasing it unrated, so if a 10-year-old wants to see it, they can buy a ticket.”
Going without a rating is just one way in which “Ice Cream Man” represents Roth making the most truly independent movie of his career. “ This is as indie as it gets,” he said. “Not just in raising the money, but in the way we’re releasing the movie. We’re releasing it independently, starting our own distribution label, putting it in theaters unrated. The theater chains have been incredible. From raising the money to shooting the movie to putting it in theaters, we’re doing it completely outside the system.”
“Ice Cream Man” opens in theaters on August 7. For more information and tickets visit the movie’s website.
