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Everybody has a version of the same memory. The jingle starts three streets over, tinny and slightly off pitch, looping a song nobody has ever heard all the way through. It gets closer. Then it stops, and you cannot tell whether the truck parked or the driver just turned the music off.
Karen Cliche did not need a horror movie to make that sound unpleasant. She got there on her own, years ago.
“I thought it was genius especially that I have always found ice cream trucks and their music so creepy!” she says about first hearing the premise of Ice Cream Man. “And that the kids are the killers? Even crazier.”
Eli Roth’s film opens wide in U.S. theaters on August 7. He directed it and co-wrote it with Noah Belson, Ari Millen plays the title character, and the setup is an idyllic summer town coming apart after an ice cream man starts serving children treats with horrifying results. Cliche plays Alison. Roth plays her husband, Marty.
An upgrade from the oven
Let us establish the important part immediately. Cliche plays Roth’s wife in the movie. This is a casting arrangement and not a marriage certificate.
It is also, by her own accounting, a promotion. The last time these two worked together was Thanksgiving, which put her in an oven and left her there.
“I definitely consider this an upgrade being his wife, from him roasting me alive in an oven!” she says.
The offer arrived the way work sometimes does, which is sideways. “I was filming one of his ‘fake trailers’ and he told me about it and asked if I would play his wife,” Cliche says. The years between the two films were not empty. They did horror conventions together, met fans, kept in touch.
Her read on Roth as a director is specific enough to be worth sitting with, mostly because it is not the standard junket compliment. “He is so supportive and helpful to his cast, we so appreciate that,” she says. “He really wants us to ‘win’ and for everything to be a collaborative effort.”
Wanting the cast to win is an odd phrase and a good one. It describes a set where the performance is something built with you rather than pulled out of you.
Eli Roth speed
Knowing a director already changes what an actor is willing to attempt on the day, and Cliche is precise about what that knowledge actually consists of.
“Eli works fast and loves improv,” she says. “So it is helpful to know that so you can be ready to work at that pace.”
Read that as a warning as much as a description. A fast, improvisational set is a gift if you arrive loose and a disaster if you arrive planning to recite. She adds that his enthusiasm does some of the work for you: “knowing his passion for horror, you can’t help but be inspired to push yourself to fulfill his vision.”
She also had the tone worked out before cameras rolled, and she frames it as her own conclusion rather than a briefing she was handed. “Eli is known for over the top, almost comedic kills and this one takes the cake,” she says. “He produced this himself so he had the freedom to do what he wanted. His imagination and passion has no bounds so I knew this was going to be a full on assault of gore.”
A full on assault of gore. That is a performer telling you what movie she thinks she made, unprompted, without a single word of it sounding like copy.
Fans with skin in the game
Ice Cream Man was financed and produced through The Horror Section, the genre label Roth launched with Media Capital Technologies, and it is his first directorial role under that banner. The company’s structure includes an unusual wrinkle, which is a mechanism for fans to buy an equity stake in the business itself.
The lazy thing to do with that fact is reprint the announcement. The more interesting thing is that Cliche’s excitement has almost nothing to do with the money.
“I think this concept is amazing and so fun for the fans to be invested financially too,” she says. “Eli listens to the fans and loves the feedback, and also loves being free to fully execute his vision.”
Ask what a filmmaker led horror company can offer that a traditional studio cannot, and her answer goes straight past the balance sheet to the audience. “The fans will be even more invested to go see it, share it, and feel a part of it,” she says. “I have grown to love and appreciate horror fans from meeting them and talking with them, and their knowledge of the genre is incredible. So them having a chance to be a part of the making of it is so fun.”
That is the real argument, and it is sturdier than any pitch deck. Horror fans already behave like stakeholders. They track directors across decades and know which effects house did what. Whether formal ownership converts that into something durable is a question nobody can answer yet. The honest position is to check back in three years.
Why she keeps coming back
Cliche has been in the genre a while now. Saw VI, Thanksgiving, and this. Ask her why and the first answer is a shrug with a laugh in it.
“I keep getting asked! Haha, but for real, I do love it.”
The second answer is not a joke at all. “It pushes you as an actor to go to dark places, even with expression and physicality which I love,” she says. “I wanted to be an actor all my life to feel things, and to have people feel things from me, so I am honoured to be able to do that.”
Horror asks things of performers that almost no other genre asks. Fear has to read from across a room, frequently through prosthetics, frequently with the camera moving and the schedule collapsing. The job is to make something impossible land as bodily fact.
Cliche thinks the audience clocks it. “They really do appreciate the intense acting abilities it takes to make those scenes come to life,” she says. “I have felt such respect from fans when they talk about the films and actors they love.”
I would put it harder than she does. Horror fans are the only audience I know of who will argue for an hour about a performance given by someone covered in corn syrup.
Never the same again
Asked what she hopes people are still talking about on the drive home, after the kills and the effects and the shock of it, Cliche does not reach for a theme.
“Fans are never going to look at ice cream trucks the same again,” she says. “Unfortunately for ice cream truck employees around the world…I think they are going to have an increase in fear of them!”
Then, after a beat: “That, or it is going to be great marketing.”
Ice Cream Man opens in theaters August 7.