“All I’ve heard my whole life is: ‘You can’t do that!’” Eli Roth says. “That’s why I started this company. I’m going to do what I want to do. You can see it or not see it. But this idea that ‘you can’t do that’ is, to me, absurd.”That offers a neat summary of the Roth strategy. Now an annoyingly handsome 54, the Massachusettsan film-maker has been shocking audiences with his splatter operas for close to a quarter of a century. It really was as long ago as 2002 that Cabin Fever (flesh-eating virus sends college students mad) emerged to outrage from the pinch-mouthed and unashamed chortles from the viscerati. Such tasteful diversions as Hostel (Europe kills Americans), The Green Inferno (cannibals eat Americans) and Thanksgiving (the national holiday chops up Americans) followed to similar divided responses.Ice Cream Man, Roth’s first feature for The Horror Section, his newly formed production company, is very much in the same school. After all this time, he still has a knack for getting seasoned horror watchers to wonder if you really can do that on screen. For fear of spoiling, we will mention just the one example. Did I really see kids playing jump rope with recently extracted human intestines? You can’t do that. Can you?“It’s not happening in real life,” Roth says. “It’s happening in a story. It’s an absurd thought to think of the children dismembering their teacher and then playing jump rope with the guts. Yeah, there’s nothing honest in it. I thought: I want the kids killing in creative ways. And what would you have at school? Okay, well, they have paper cutters. So, they cut the hand off, which is something I used to do.”Wait? What?“When I was at school, I brought a fake hand in seventh grade to art class where they had the paper cutter, and I scrunched up my fist and I put the fake hand in,” he clarifies. “I was talking to the teacher, asking a question, and I went whack, and he screamed and almost had a heart attack. People couldn’t believe I did it. I thought that was funny. I thought it was the funniest thing in the world.”Okay, fair enough. We will come back to the cheap provocation, but there are, dare one say it, some semi-serious arguments being made in Ice Cream Man. On the surface this is an entertaining attempt to create a new horror franchise for the ages. The blank-faced Ari Millen plays the titular mobile dessert vendor. The ice cream tastes good, but, as no Roth fan will be surprised to hear, it turns children into homicidal maniacs. As in the great zombie films, the possessed children act out extreme versions of behaviours common in everyday mortal life.Ice Cream Man: For all its deliberate silliness, Eli Roth's latest fim could be seen as reflecting the concerns of a new parent And there is more explicit commentary.“I’m a 12-year-old girl,” one character says after accidentally ingesting some of the tainted gelato. “Of course I know how to make myself vomit.” This apparent reference to bulimia chilled me more than any of the explicit gross-out stuff. Can you do that?“Well, I wanted the dialogue to be honest,” Roth says “And then thinking about the way the parents were a little bit self-involved – not paying attention to the kids and what’s on their phone, what’s infiltrating their minds. Really not fully paying attention to what could get to your kid, and what could then turn them against you. So, all of those things played into it. “But, if there was a line that was dark, but it was honest and it was real – the amount of girls I know that went through situations like that – I wanted to have it. And there’s no judgment about it.”For all the flashy showmanship and unstoppable talk – Roth rivals his pal Quentin Tarantino for machine-gun delivery – he reveals himself to be a bit of a moralist. He and his wife, the fashion designer Vittoria Buraschi, had a daughter early last year. For all its deliberate silliness, Ice Cream Man could be seen as reflecting the concerns of a new parent.“I have a baby girl,” Roth says. “All you think about is protecting your child, There’s a feeling that ultimately you can’t. No matter what you do, the world is going to get to them in some way. All you can do is prepare them. You can’t protect them. There is this real fear of some force – some outside force – coming into your perfect little neighbourhood and infecting your child’s mind and turning them against you.”Has he thought about how much “screen time” his daughter should be allowed?“She’s a baby. So, I don’t. She doesn’t watch anything. But then we were on a plane recently and she was getting squirrelly. She never sat on a plane that long. So I put on Zootopia. And I was like: ‘Whoa!’ She loved it, but my wife and I were like: ‘This is it’.”It feels as if, despite material advances, it is harder to be a kid than it was when Roth and I were queuing up at the ice cream van. I’m not sure every generation thinks that as it ages. There is often a lot of “kids never had it so good” baloney. But the pressures from social media and other online menaces are impossible to ignore. Life was, on balance, less stressful for us.Eli Roth: 'I saw Alien when I was eight years old and I turned to my dad and I said: I want to be a producer.' Photograph: Adali Schell/The New York Times “Oh yeah, I mean, we were allowed to make mistakes,” Roth says. We could screw up, and maybe some kids still made fun of you. Maybe there’s an embarrassing thing that happened at summer camp, and it made it back to school. There were stories about it, but there was no physical record of it. It’s not like if you had a bad hair day, someone took a photograph and it haunted you forever. Kids are told you’ve got to put yourself out there on the internet because everyone else is doing it. This one does it and they’re making money, and they’re getting validation from the wrong source.”Indeed. Being noticed on the internet is the only thing worse than not being noticed on the internet. Online success brings its own unique stresses.“They call them the Anxious Generation. There’s so much more pressure on children now to be perfect.”Roth seems to have a had a happy enough upbringing. Censorious conservatives seeking triggers for his later interest in extreme cinema will find little of interest. Dad was then a professor in psychiatry at Harvard. His mother was a painter. He began shooting Super 8 footage when he was barely able to hold a camera upright, knocking off 100 shorts before he made his way to film school at New York University in the early 1990s. He tells me that his parents always understood that movie violence was the stuff of fantasy.“I remember I was drawing pictures of The Exorcist from the newspaper ads – and Alien,” he says. “I have the drawings. I put them out there. My drawings when I was eight of Alien and Blazing Saddles and stuff. My teacher called my parents, going: ‘We’re very concerned about the drawings.’ And my parents were like: ‘We’re not. He’s creative. Well, that’s what he’s interested in. That’s what he finds interesting’.”[ Why do we love horror films? An Italian pasta dish holds a clueOpens in new window ]Roth is, thus, among that band of boomer and Gen X film-maker – the likes of Spielberg and Tarantino – who translated teenage hobby into a successful career. Everybody is a film-maker now. Everyone has a movie camera on their smartphone. Back then it was expensive to process film and it required real skill to edit that footage. There are thousands out there who set aside the hobby and moved into straight jobs. I am betting Roth, apparently the most determined of men, was always focused on becoming a professional film-maker.“I saw Alien when I was eight years old and I turned to my dad and I said: ‘I want to be a producer.’ I literally said that. My dad said: ‘Well, Eli, you know, a producer has to come up with all the money.’ And then I saw it was directed by Ridley Scott. I said: ‘What does the director do?’ And my dad said: ‘The director gets to spend the money, to tell everyone what to do.’ I said: ‘I want to be a director’.”He subsequently noticed that Stanley Kubrick did both jobs and elected to follow that example. Many colourful legends attach themselves to his life during and after NYU. The Internet Movie Database lists such memorable acting roles as “Subway Man (uncredited)” in The Lost World: Jurassic Park and “Shocked Unlooker” in Terror Firmer [sic]. He met David Lynch and ended up producing content for that renowned film-maker’s website. Back in 1996, he worked as an assistant to Howard Stern on the then unavoidable shock jock’s film Private Parts. While on that last gig, Roth began sketching out ideas for the film that was to become Cabin Fever. It took until 2001 to get the shocker into production. Financed independently to the tune of $1.5 million, it eventually sold to Lionsgate Films for $3.5 million and became that studio’s highest-grossing film of 2003. Tarantino announced himself a fan.From then until now, the unconvinced have pondered his addiction to the bloodily revolting.[ From the archive: Is this the first Bruce Willis movie written by Russian trolls?Opens in new window ]“I know what I’m doing,” he says. “I understand what a horror movie is. I know how to be shocking and offensive in the right way. It’s not that you want to just be gross and repellent. You want to tell something that is provocative. And people want their buttons pushed when they go see a horror movie. They want to see stuff that you’re not supposed to see. It’s supposed to be transgressive, but you have to be clever, you have to be smart and you have to be engaging and surprise people in ways they never saw coming before.”Roth has ended up as a more public figure than he can have expected. It helps that he has a glamour about him. His performance as Sergeant Donny Donowitz in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds gave him a chance to walk the red carpet at Cannes in 2009. He is back on the screen as father to a young protagonist in Ice Cream Man. When he turns up at conventions the crowds part for an off-centre innards-swilling celebrity auteur.“I enjoy it for the right things,” he says. “When people come up to me, they want to talk to me about horror movies or Inglourious Basterds and I love talking about Tarantino and I love talking about horror movies. So, generally, when the people recognise me, they recognise me because we’re into the same stuff.”And the man can talk. Those fans will get their money’s worth.Ice Cream Man is in cinemas from August 7th