Ice Cream Man has fans losing it after filmmakers secretly captured their unfiltered first reactions to Eli Roth's new horror movie. The unusual promotional move has turned genuine audience responses into part of the film's marketing, giving horror fans a glimpse at just how strongly viewers reacted when the blood and chaos unfolded in front of them.

The film marks the first release from Roth's newly launched production company, The Horror Section, which was created with the goal of giving genre filmmakers greater creative freedom. Ice Cream Man arrives as an unrated theatrical horror experience that has been positioned as something far more extreme than a conventional slasher.

That promise already appears to be generating exactly the kind of conversation the filmmaker could have hoped for. While some viewers have embraced the movie's excessive gore, others have been left horrified by what they saw, making the first wave of reactions almost as entertaining as the film itself.

The reactions captured around Ice Cream Man are particularly interesting because they do not simply lean in one direction. Instead, the footage and posts surrounding the movie reveal an audience split between people who think the film's outrageousness is exactly what makes it entertaining and those who seem genuinely appalled by what Eli Roth has put on screen.

"hidden cameras capturing actual reactions for Ice Cream Man is such a clever promo move," MikaMori wrote on X, praising the marketing strategy itself. The comment gets at what makes the campaign so effective: rather than telling audiences that Ice Cream Man is shocking, the filmmakers are allowing viewers' own faces and immediate responses to make that argument.

"Everyone who reviews Ice Cream Man describes it as a gratuitous gore fest that prioritizes shock value over story. Like bruh I was already gonna watch it you don't have to convince me," Approved for Streaming posted. The reaction suggests that for at least some horror fans, the film's reputation for going completely overboard with its violence is not a warning at all, but part of the appeal.

"I just watched The Ice Cream Man trailer. WTAF??? it's the grossest thing I think I've ever seen," Garsh wrote after watching the trailer. The blunt response captures the other side of the conversation, with the movie apparently managing to leave some viewers less excited about the gore than genuinely stunned by how far Roth is willing to take it.

"Ice Cream Man is the worst movie ive seen in theaters by far and my dumbass saw young washington," Dan wrote, providing perhaps the harshest reaction in the bunch. His blunt verdict offers a stark contrast to the viewers celebrating the movie, making it clear that Ice Cream Man is producing the kind of wildly divided response that comes with a horror film determined to push its audience to the extreme.

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Taken together, the reactions suggest that Ice Cream Man is not inspiring many middle-of-the-road opinions. Some viewers are clearly having a blast with its excess, while others seem to think the movie crosses the line from outrageous fun into outright bad filmmaking, giving the conversation around Roth's latest an entertainingly chaotic edge.

Ice Cream Man is the inaugural release from The Horror Section, the production company Eli Roth launched after years of working within a studio system where horror filmmakers can face restrictions over gore, language and other provocative material. With this movie, Roth wanted the freedom to pursue the kind of extreme genre filmmaking that he felt could not be fully realized under conventional studio limitations.

The premise alone makes that intention fairly clear. Co-written by Roth and his childhood friend Noah Belson, the screenplay follows a sinister ice cream man whose frozen treats transform children into bloodthirsty killers, with the project having spent more than two decades waiting to reach the screen because its outrageous premise proved difficult to finance.

Roth eventually found the opportunity to revive the movie after the theatrical success of Terrifier 3 helped demonstrate that audiences were willing to show up for unrated horror. The filmmaker has said he wanted Ice Cream Man to be something "pure and raw," while the changing theatrical landscape gave him the confidence that there was an audience willing to embrace a completely unrestrained gore movie on the big screen.

That ambition is perhaps most evident in the movie's enormous school-set sequence, which runs for roughly 30 minutes and involved around 100 child actors. Roth drew inspiration from the scale of the Omaha Beach sequence in Saving Private Ryan, creating a sprawling piece of horror mayhem that reportedly became one of the wildest shooting experiences of his career.

The result is a horror movie that seems determined to make subtlety the last thing on its mind, although its most recent controversy has shifted the conversation beyond gore. Eli Roth has also acknowledged using AI in a very small portion of a few scenes after initially saying the animation was created traditionally, adding another layer to the debate surrounding Ice Cream Man and its unconventional filmmaking choices.

And perhaps that is exactly why the hidden-camera campaign works so well. Instead of another polished collection of celebrity reactions or carefully selected praise, viewers are getting the messy, immediate responses that a movie this outrageous is naturally going to provoke.

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After seeing these reactions, are you going to watch Ice Cream Man in theaters? Let us know in the comments!