Among all the horror franchises that have cried out for a new entry in the 2020s, Ice Cream Man would seem to be a mere footnote. The original, direct-to-video film, released in 1995, told the story of a former sanatorium patient (Clint Howard) who now runs an ice cream parlor and incorporates human flesh into his sweet treats. It featured a few horror stars and developed a solid cult following, but for three decades, it has stood as a stand-alone. Technically, Ice Cream Man couldn’t even be called a franchise – until now.
History of Follow-up Attempt
This is not to say that the deceptively strong fanbase of Ice Cream Man has never before been tantalized with the prospect of a sequel. In October of 2014, it was announced on Kickstarter that Clint Howard and the original film’s director, Norman Apstein, had begun a crowdfunding campaign for a sequel titled Ice Cream Man 2: Sundae Bloody Sundae.
Alas, after 8 days, this follow-up was canceled, the Kickstarter campaign having raised a mere $4,000 – barely 1% of the project’s $300,00-budget goal. However, Apstein was not discouraged; in his statement on Kickstarter, he expressed great appreciation for his film’s supportive fanbase and asserted that he and Howard would “be looking at a different sort of structure for future crowd funding (with a larger PR budget to get the message out there) as well as other alternative financing for the film. You haven’t heard the last from the Ice Cream Man!”
A Promise at Last Fulfilled
Last year, in an interview with Bloody Disgusting on the set of last year’s grisly slasher Terrifier 3 (the most recent film role out of over two hundred acting credits), Howard revealed that his iconic ’90s cult classic is getting a follow-up. Moreover, he asserted that he would be portraying another ice cream man in this film. At this year’s Halloween Horror Nights, he made the same assertions to the popular horror YouTube channel Dead Meat.
The second revelation might raise a few eyebrows, considering that the original Ice Cream Man ended with its titular villain shredded to bits in the very ice cream mixer with which he committed his atrocities. This is probably why Howard has stressed that he will be playing “an” ice cream man, in what sounds more like a reboot than a sequel to the first film. “It has no similarity to the first one,” he said to Bloody-Disgusting.com, “except that I’m getting hired to play an ice cream man.”
In his recent talk with the Dead Meat Podcast, Howard similarly emphasized the differences between this upcoming film and the original Ice Cream Man. “There’s not a lot of children in it,” he explained, as a contrast to how the original film centered around the efforts of a group of local kids to expose the ice cream man as a deranged murderer, “And by about page 60, you’re going to start to understand why a man would put body parts in his ice cream.”
A Prolific Actor’s First Time Directing
Although Apstein worked with Howard and with Howard’s wife, Katherine Cruz, in developing the story for this new film, its director will be none other than Howard himself. This will be his first directorial effort; between the number of film sets he’s been on and the fact that his older brother, Ron Howard, has been directing for decades (and won Best Picture doing so), it’s safe to say that he’s had more than his share of indirect experience with how it’s done.
Indeed, in his Bloody Disgusting interview, Howard described how valuable his time working on Terrifier 3 has been in teaching him and Cruz about filmmaking. “They may not realize it,” he said, “but they’re sharing information with us.” He also explained that the film would be made “at a modest level.”
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