The jingle of an ice cream truck is about to become the worst sound on your street. Eli Roth has released a green band trailer and a fresh official poster for ICE CREAM MAN, and even the version safe for daytime television looks like a birthday party that called an ambulance.
The premise is simple and deeply unwell. A smiling vendor coasts through a sunny town, hands the local kids a frozen treat, and the treat flips a switch in them. The children get hungry in a way no snack will fix. The adults are what is for dinner.
Not the one you are thinking of
Anyone who grew up renting the 1995 Clint Howard curio off a sticky video store shelf can relax. The production has stated plainly that this is not a remake or reimagining of that movie. Roth reportedly sat on this idea for roughly two decades before finally building it out with his writing partner Noah Belson. Same name, brand new nightmare, no relation.
The man behind the window
Ari Millen drives the truck as the title character, and he lands in that specific uncanny register where a guy looks completely friendly and completely wrong at the same time. You would wave at him in your driveway. You would think about that wave later.
Around him is an ensemble stacked with kids, which is the entire grisly engine of the thing, plus Benjamin Byron Davis, Karen Cliche, Sarah Abbott, Shiloh O’Reilly, and Charlie Zeltzer. Roth himself turns up on screen too.
This is the director back on the patch of ground he paved himself. After Cabin Fever, Hostel, and Thanksgiving, gleeful summertime carnage is less a genre for Roth than a hometown.
Snoop on the score, Nas on the call sheet
The credits page is a flex for a film about weaponized popsicles. Snoop Dogg contributes original music, and Nas executive produces through his Mass Appeal partnership with The Horror Section. It is a lot of rap royalty for a movie whose body count is mostly under four feet tall. That is all the ink it needs.
How nasty are we talking
Very. The earlier red band cut leaned cartoonishly gruesome and played the whole feral murder children concept for laughs, and the conversation around it since has flagged that the trailers may have already spooned out a generous helping of the kills. Whether that wrecks the surprise or just sets the table is going to come down to what sends you to a Roth movie in the first place.
ICE CREAM MAN scoops into US theaters through The Horror Section, with UK and Irish cinemas getting it on 7 August 2026.
New poster is below. Maybe walk to the corner store this summer.
