After Zach Cregger’s Weapons was one of our favorite movies of 2025 and one of this year’s Oscar winners, any comparison might be considered a compliment. Enter Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man. Sure, it has killer children who become hypnotized by an unsuspecting villain, but it’s not only been in the works for longer, it’s a completely different treat.
CinemaBlend had the pleasure of talking to the filmmaker behind the Thanksgiving trailer-turned-movie during San Diego Comic-Con. In our Eli Roth interview, which can be viewed in full on YouTube, he broke down his relationship with Ice Cream Man being called things like “Weapons with sprinkles.” In Roth’s words:
I actually waited until I was done with editing before I watched it. The week we started shooting was when Weapons came out, and I had actually called JD, one of the producers, and I was like, ‘You don’t have to tell me what Weapons is about, but let me tell you what I’m doing with Ice Cream Man, and you tell me if there’s stuff I have to watch out for.’
Funnily enough, the story of Ice Cream Man starts back in the summer of 2003. When Roth heard the sound of an ice cream truck, it led the filmmaker to think dark thoughts about a messed up movie concept. What if the Ice Cream Man was like a Pied Piper that inspired kids to become serial killers?
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He wrote the first draft of the script back then, but the idea about killer children didn’t get a financing deal right away. Weapons might have been finished with production before Ice Cream Man, but when he heard about it, he steered clear until he made his movie. As he continued:
[JD] goes, ‘Okay, our movie’s completely different. It’s not about that, and anything you’re thinking of going for, just go farther and you’ll be fine.’ And then, the crew went out and saw it. [Second Unit Director Justin Harding] saw it and [Director of Photography Simon Shohet] went. They were like, ‘We’re good. Don’t worry about it.’
As someone who’s seen both movies, I can agree. Sure, there are some loose parallels between them, but Ice Cream Man plays out as if Weapons‘ final scene was the whole movie, and is even bloodier!
As Roth also added, every movie is inspired by something. Here’s more about his inspirations for Ice Cream Man:
You do everything you can. I had this idea years ago. I was really inspired by The Birds. There’s a 1980 movie called The Children and Invasion of Body Snatchers and Bad News Bears and Saving Private Ryan and E.T. And Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Halloween 3, and obviously Hannibal. All these things that are in your head. And then, someone said, ‘It’s Weapons in a waffle cone.’ I was like, ‘That’s actually pretty good’.
Hey, and why not embrace it? Weapons was the horror success story of last summer, and fans of that film could be craving more scary movies starring children. Ice Cream Man has a mysterious truck luring the children of a suburb to have a cold treat. Usually that’s harmless, but this ice cream man’s inventory makes kids homicidal towards any adults in their path.
If you’re wondering how Roth was able to cast a classroom of children in gory roles, he told us it was “actually quite simple.” The parents of the kids were horror fans themselves who understood his vision. Oh, and the child actors had “the time of their lives” being covered in phony guts and getting sticky with fake blood. As Roth added:
There’s nothing you can do about it. Similarities happen… Maybe the lesson is make the idea as soon as you have it because it’s not a crazy conclusion though that with children and us wanting to protect children, that they’d had an idea of killer kids. It’s not a crazy idea that someone would weaponize kids. So, it’s a similar theme. We’re interested in similar things.
Ice Cream Man is aptly scheduled among upcoming horror movies to come out in the dead of summer, next Friday, August 7.