Eli Roth had to approach Ice Cream Man from a completely different point of view now that he’s a father. 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. There’s this inherent trust with the ice cream man coming to town, that’s broken. 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”. “It’s taking things that you could normally find at school, and using those as weapons.