Director Eli Roth stood in front of a bloody banner touting the Bayleen Bay Annual Ice Cream Social, a blue-and-white-checked tablecloth covered with gore.
Roth couldn’t have been happier with what he’d created.
The Ice Cream Social Massacre was an off-site activation for Roth’s “Ice Cream Man,” which opens in theaters on Friday, Aug. 7. It’s the story of a creepy ice cream man who comes to town offering wicked treats to its children. Upon eating the cones and other delights, they form into a swarming horde out to kill all the adults they can find.
“At some point on the ‘Cabin Fever’ press tour in 2003, I saw an ice cream truck and the music just triggered these memories,” Roth said, smiling benignly just a few yards from the spot where visitors could play tetherball with a fake severed head. “You start salivating and, like, running towards the ice cream truck.
“And I thought, ‘What if this person was a serial killer?’” he said. “Like, we just sort of trust ice cream men. Then the music was making me think of the Pied Piper, and like, what if the combination of the ice cream and the music could activate the children to just go and massacre all the adults?
“What if the ice cream is turning them crazier, and suddenly the kid apocalypse happens?”
Roth, we should note, doesn’t think like the creatives a block or two east at the Nickelodeon activation. In case you were wondering.
“I wanted it incredibly creative and fun and just over-the-top kills,” he said. “Stuff that kids could do and that kids would do. And the kids are having fun while they’re killing. They’re not evil kids. It’s like Christmas morning.
“They’re gleefully hacking, but they’re using all this stuff from school,” Roth continued. “I wanted to push it as far as it possibly could go.”
The film’s young actors were treated like adults for the shoot, which made it easier for them to work with the viscera and oozy bits on set.
“I asked them, ‘Do you want me to direct you as kids or adults?’” Roth said. “They said, ‘Direct us like adults.’ I said, ‘OK, the way I direct Jack Black or Cate Blanchett is how I’m going to direct you.’ They said great.”
He also kept the set fun for his murderous mob of middle-schoolers with improvisation at times.
“If they did a great job and the take was amazing and we knew that we nailed it, I’d pull over Kiori [Mirza Waldman], who plays Mia, the girl. I’d say, ‘OK, this take, you need to do it like Peppa Pig. But don’t tell the guys.’
“She’d go back, and she’s like, ‘Right, we’ve got to stop the ice cream man,’” Roth says in a Peppa-esque British accent. “And the other two would start doing British accents, too.”
Early on, Roth says he decided to release the movie without a rating rather than make cuts – film footage, that is – necessary to get an R rating. The success of “Terrifier 3” without a rating suggested to him that the lack of a rating might now be more commercially viable.
“I always feel whenever I make a horror movie at some point I have to take something out to get an R rating,” he said. “That’s part of the process. But this one, I didn’t want to see the R-rated version. I wanted it fully unrated.
“Fans are ready for it,” Roth continued. “We all know it’s fake. Everybody watches ‘Walking Dead.’ Everybody’s seen everything. So fans of gore that want this kind of ‘Reanimator,’ ‘Evil Dead 2’ level of insanity, I wanted to put it in theaters.