Eli Roth's Ice Cream Man changed when he became a dad
Eli Roth directed the upcoming horror film - about a suburban town which descends into bloody chaos after an ice cream man serves sweet treats which turn kids into killers - but actually wrote the script for it 20 years ago.
Eli Roth had to approach Ice Cream Man from a completely different point of view now that he’s a father.
The 54-year-old directed the upcoming horror film - about a suburban town which descends into bloody chaos after an ice cream man serves sweet treats which turn kids into killers - but actually wrote the script for it 20 years ago.
However, now that he’s a dad himself, to daughter Donatella with wife Vittoria Buraschi, he has a different outlook on the plot.
He told Creative Screenwriting: “I’m a father of a 17-month-old baby girl, so even though I wrote the script 20 years ago, and I was thinking about the ice cream man and the kids going crazy back then. I’m approaching it from a very different point of view now.
“I looked at the script and rewrote it from the point of view of being a parent, and everything is about protecting your child.
“There are all these things you want to do to protect your child, and ultimately, you can’t. You can only prepare them for the world.”
Eli added that while parents can adopt a “screen free” household, it “doesn’t matter” to a certain degree.
He mused: “At some point, my daughter’s going to go to school, and there’ll be someone there with a screen. There’ll be some idea that gets in her head.
“This is a very primal fear of something being turned against you. There’s this inherent trust with the ice cream man coming to town, that’s broken.
“We trust people in uniform. So, it’s taking that idea and having someone who violates that, is really scary.”
While Ice Cream Man sticks to Eli’s usual slasher horror formula to some extent, he also wanted it to explore the “perversion of childhood”.
He explained: “I wanted kills that were fun, but also kills where kids aren’t just taking a gun and shooting. That has different connotations. I wanted more creative kills.
“The film is all about the perversion of childhood. We start off with kids playing jump rope, and then you see them jump rope with intestines.
“They’re playing pin the tail on the donkey, and then they pin the tail on the teacher with a knife.
“It’s taking things that you could normally find at school, and using those as weapons. It’s all the things that we never think to use as a weapon.”
