In the horror genre, limitations are virtues. Some of the most successful and innovative genre films of all time have been low-budget works whose greatest artistic strokes were the direct result of the filmmakers not having access to unlimited resources and instead simply having to make do with what was readily available to them.
From George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to John Carpenter’s Halloween to Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project to Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity to Curry Barker’s Obsession, all of these films were made with substantial constraints and made all the better by them.
Even more infamously, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws wouldn’t be the iconic and generational cinematic touchstone that it is today if not for the real-world problem of the animatronic shark constantly breaking down. This limitation turned into the greatest virtue of all, as Spielberg opted to instead keep the shark hidden from viewers for the lion’s share of the film and lean into the Hitchcockian suspense of it all. If the filmmakers were working with limitless resources, these distinct and motivated choices would have never been made, and the film would not have ever become what it is today.
All of this is illustrative of how important the hands-on and authentic craft of filmmaking is across every genre, but even more especially as it pertains to horror films. Horror is a tactile genre, one in which audiences long to feel the impact and immersion of a real, believable world and be scared out of their wits by an idea turned into reality by hours-upon-hours of creative toil. This is why it’s such an egregious slap in the face to the genre, the history of horror, and audiences when Eli Roth chooses to use AI in his new movie, Ice Cream Man.
If anyone should know the value of practical work in the horror genre, it’s f-cking Eli Roth. The filmmaker initially made a name for himself with low-budget horror fare in the ‘90s and ‘00s, such as Cabin Fever and Hostel. Even as he continued work in the decades that followed, he stuck with predominantly practical effects work as many of his genre peers began to embrace the capabilities of CGI and digital effects. Roth not only stuck to predominantly practical effects work for his films but also very publicly espoused the inherent value of such a choice time and again, saying that he consistently felt something was lost in translation when filmmakers opted to use digital gags in their horror films.
So as you can undoubtedly see for yourself, the dissonance between that belief and the fact that he used AI for several elements of Ice Cream Man is so thick that one can hardly wade through it. Ice Cream Man is a self-proclaimed ‘splatter’ horror film, inspired by the success of works like unrated low-budget films like Damien Leone’s Terrifier sequels. Like those films, Ice Cream Man is aiming to foreground extremely gory practical effects work, but it's also utilizing AI for entire sequences. This is the cinematic equivalent of telling a dinner guest you are going to serve them a filet mignon and then proceeding to slather that cut of meat in dog shit before serving it. The sheer presence of the latter completely cancels out any of the potentially good qualities of the former, and it's obscene that Roth doesn’t seem to realize this.
After all, Roth knows more than a thing or two about horror history. This is the man who quite literally hosted a series on AMC for several years called Eli Roth’s History of Horror. He knows that great horror films stem from hands-on work and embracing limitations rather than using AI slop to merely ‘vibecode’ over them. He knows that some of the greatest works in horror history have come from the most minute of places. And yet, despite all of this, he used AI in Ice Cream Man, and it’s absolutely atrocious.
Upon the news unexpectedly coming to light that Ice Cream Man features AI (something that Roth had previously denied, or at least deliberately obfuscated), Roth simply offered the explanation that "it was an opportunity where technology and creativity came together to help bring my vision for the film to life.” What that statement fails to take into account is that AI technology is, by its very definition, the death of creativity. AI is incapable of creating original work in any way, shape, or form. It is the equivalent of a digital blender, simply responding to user prompts with regurgitation en masse.
If anything good can come from this whole debacle, my sincerest of hopes is that the backlash to Roth’s use of AI in Ice Cream Man can help to dissuade other filmmakers from employing such tactics. I completely understand that making a low-budget film is difficult and that you come up against obstacles that can feel utterly insurmountable in the moment. But that is quite literally the name of the game, especially when it comes to the horror genre; you have to embrace those limitations and find a way to turn them into creative virtues, which have the potential to ultimately enrich your work rather than hinder it. If your go-to response when coming up against such a limitation is to simply prompt a generative AI tool, then you are doing a gargantuan disservice to not only horror history, not only the audience, but also to yourself.
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