Borderlands director Eli Roth previously said he drew an animated sequence in his upcoming horror Ice Cream Man himself; now he admits that AI was also used. Director Eli Roth’s latest horror effort, Ice Cream Man, is beginning to get precisely the wrong kind of publicity in the build-up to its release later this week. ... Ice Cream Man | Eli Roth admits to using AI in his latest horror effort
Borderlands director Eli Roth previously said he drew an animated sequence in his upcoming horror Ice Cream Man himself; now he admits that AI was also used.
Director Eli Roth’s latest horror effort, Ice Cream Man, is beginning to get precisely the wrong kind of publicity in the build-up to its release later this week.
The low-budget slasher uses generative AI in certain sequences, the filmmaker has admitted – including a scene that he previously said he’d drawn himself.
Polygon first broke the story, having previously spoken to Roth in the build-up to Ice Cream Man's release. A few weeks ago, the filmmaker talked about an animated scene that tells the backstory of its titular villain, who hands out sweet treats that turn kids into demonic killers. Roth said at the time that he drew the frames for this sequence himself, and that he then handed these over to a team of artists to smooth out the animation.
“I have an animation background and I drew it,” Roth said. “I worked with an animation team and […] I drew the loop cycles and the styles. Then I had some animators help kind of make it a little more fluid, and I worked with an artist to give it a bit of an old-timey jittery feel. But I sat there and I drew out the frames that I wanted, and I tried to match the style of the 1920s haunted Mickey Mouse cartoons.”
On Reddit, users who’d seen the film began to question the look of this scene, arguing that it bore the hallmarks of something generated with AI. It was also noted that the company name Dark Half shows up in Ice Cream Man’s credits – a studio that specialises in providing gen-AI sequences to the film and TV industry, as outlined on its own website.
Polygon got in touch with Roth again, and the filmmaker replied that he “misspoke” in his previous interview.
“AI was used in a very small portion of a few scenes in the film,” he said. “It was an opportunity where technology and creativity came together to help bring my vision for the film to life.”
Roth hasn’t yet specified which scenes use AI.
Ice Cream Man is Roth’s first film since Borderlands, a calamitous videogame adaptation that was delayed multiple times, went through reshoots, and eventually dribbled out in 2024 to grim reviews and bleak box office numbers.
Roth quietly blamed its failure on Zoom calls before launching The Horror Section, an indie studio dedicated to making “hardcore” genre films on low budgets. Ice Cream Man is the first such offering. The reviews so far have not been kind.
Ice Cream Man is in UK cinemas from the 7th August.
