Ariana Grande is making it clear that her upcoming break was not a reaction to anything and was planned in advance.

During a performance at the United Center in Chicago on Monday night, Grande took a moment to address the audience and speculation around her persona.

“So basically, the announcement that was made yesterday was not a reactive or impulsive thing,” she told her fans at the Chicago stop of the Eternal Sunshine Tour. “It is something that I had decided to plan that I had quietly made a long time ago and it’s a decision that was made from a thoughtful and empowered place.”

Grande noted that “many things can be true at the same time,” adding, “I want to share this because I heard that my fans were worried that negativity was ruining things for me, but I just have to say that could not be more the f*** opposite. Honestly, this is not what that is. And I just want to be very, very clear: Multiple things can be true at the same time. Yes, boundaries, they need to be set. Human beings can need a break sometimes. And also, this can be and will continue to be the greatest experience of my professional and creative life.”

She continued, “No matter what noises exist out there, nothing will ever be able to distort my reality or be more real to me or elaborate to me than this love that we share. The rest of that sh** is not mine to carry, so I don’t carry it. I need to get out here and differentiate that from my truth for you all because I love you and this tour has been the most healing, beautiful, corrective, magnificent, special experience of my life.”

Grande’s clarification comes after the star dropped out of the West End’s Sunday in the Park with George revival amid “ongoing public scrutiny” over her physical health following the release of the “Petal” music video.

In a statement to Deadline, Grande’s team said, “Ariana will be taking a step back from visibility after she completes the Eternal Sunshine Tour. She looks forward to finishing the tour and ending it on a high note, both healthily and happily and then taking a much-deserved break from public facing work and appearances which has lead to endless, ongoing public scrutiny. This tour has been a beautiful experience for her. She loves her fans and has loved every minute of this tour so much.”

Watch part of Ariana Grande’s speech in the video below.

Taking a cue from the likes of Jason, Freddy, Leatherface, Michael Myers, Chucky, Candyman, and countless others, Horrormeister Eli Roth has now realized a 20 year dream to give the same fame in the genre to the Ice Cream Man in the simply titled new film, Ice Cream Man. That’s right. Roth hopes to immortalize the guy who drives around neighborhoods in that musical ice cream truck, the one kids have flocked to ever since wheels were invented. What he has created is just another excuse for mind-numbing graphic terror, but unfortunately has forgotten to provide much of a plot to keep us hooked. The filmmaker felt no studio would touch his vision of unfiltered gross-out dismemberings and the movie is being released unrated and under the moniker of The Horror Section, a new distributor Roth has created to put it into theatres.

Essentially the director is taking the idea of seeing kids unleashed to invoke whatever pain they can possibly muster on adults ala Home Alone but making it so gross-out bloodletting that it would get an NC 17 if a rating were slapped on it. What Roth, and his longtime screenwriting partner Noah Belson have concocted is an unfleshed-out idea that is just left with the flesh.

Opening on a typical sunny summer day in a fictional American small town called Bayleen Bay, we see a little league game in progress when an Ice Cream truck comes rolling in and the propreitor, a man with a creepy smile begins handing out free samples to all the kids. What a nice gesture. Uh, not. The ice cream man has revenge on his mind because as we will later discover via flashbacks, he was bullied and battered years earlier by the other kids in the town, leading to a miserable life. Now he is back, those kids are now the parents of a new generation that unknowingly is being weaponized thru his ice cream in order to have them kill their parents and everyone else over the age of 12. This is a man serving up double scoops of terror but the children are doing his bidding while he approvingly looks on.

When these kids march into the school the next day like zombies with colorful flavors of ice cream smeared across their mouths, the grown ups do not know what they are in for but about 15 minutes into what appeared to be just a nice idyllic film, all hell breaks loose and these kids one by one start chainsawing off heads, some unmentionable parts, legs, arms, hands , feet – you name it. They find new inventive uses for daddy’s power tools, make jumpropes out of guts, serve up scoops of the school principal’s brains, and well, you get the picture. Chopping up their parents and teachers has never been so much fun as these kids take command gleefully and with joy as the ice cream man (actor Ari Millen in a dialogue-less performance) leads the band. If all this sounds like your kind of entertainment, I suggest you check in with your therapist.

Roth is pretty gleeful himself, a director who has taken the genre to the limits in movies like 2002’s Cabin Fever, 2005’s torture porn Hostel , and the 2023 holiday horror flick Thanksgiving which was the feature film realization of a ludicrous fake theatrical trailer in Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse, but here he is really stretching the limits of taste, no doubt intentionally. Unfortunately the timing is off as this underdeveloped concept looks like a bad attempted imitation of last summer’s far superior Zach Cregger directed smash hit Oscar winning Weapons which had a similar idea of a whole town’s kids being mysteriously weaponized. Ice Cream Man feels like a (very) low budget attempt to capitalize and exploit, even if Roth has waited 20 years to get it made. Also it seems ill-timed since this year has also seen smart reinventions of the horror genre with the likes of Obsession and Backrooms finding critical acclaim and huge audiences. With this film though we are just back to basics with no ambition beyond finding ways to tear the human body apart that somehow we haven’t seen before. There is even one kid carrying around his severed mother’s head like a stuffed teddy bear. Sweet.

Now it does appear Roth and company are going for laughs in some ways, the absurdity of it all, and I must confess it works in one scene with a priest hiding from the ice cream man and delivering complex instructions to three kids who have thus far avoided the curse so they can break the spell and end this holy terror: “You kill the siren, you cut the Necromancer’s head off, he’ll be wearing a ceremonial cloak, but do not remove the hood, find the ice cream man and remove the hood, make the ice cream man look into the Necromancer’s eyes, that will kill him”.

Got all that? No spoiler alert on if the kids succeed in this daunting task, but it does all end with a spirited rap tune written and sung by none other than Snoop Dogg. “I Scream. You Scream. We Scream. ICE CREAM!”

Producers are Roth and Kate Harrison Karman.

Title: Ice Cream Man

Distributor: The Horror Section

Release Date: August 7, 2026

Director: Eli Roth

Screenplay: Eli Roth and Noah Belson

Cast: AriMillen, Benjamin Byron Davis, Eli Roth, Karen Cliche, Dylan Hawco, Sarah Abbott, Shiloh O’Reilly, Kiori Mirza Waldman, Charlie Zeltzer, Charlie Storey

Rating: Unrated

Running Time: 1 hour and 26 minutes

If you’re looking up the credits for Ice Cream Man on IMDB, you might as well skip past director/co-screenwriter Eli Roth and the extensive cast list. Because the real stars of this ultra-gonzo horror film are the folks in the makeup department, especially prosthetics designers Steve Newburn and Adrien Morot (the latter an Oscar winner for his work on The Whale). Sure, Roth came up with the story and co-wrote the screenplay. But his efforts would have been for naught if you didn’t fully believe the sights of young children dismembering their parents’ bodies or playing games of tetherball and tag with human heads. Not to mention the tug of war using human intestines.

If all of that sounds like a euphoric cinematic experience, then this the film for you. It’s certainly the film for its auteur, who conceived the idea more than two decades ago and has been trying to make it ever since. Since the major studios passed on his idea about a townful of kids turned into crazed, murderous zombies, Roth formed his own company, The Horror Section, to distribute his labor of love. Not surprisingly, the film is being released unrated.

The film doesn’t feature a particularly complicated scenario. The strange-looking driver of a weirdly decorated ice cream truck driving through the sort of idyllic American small town painted by Norman Rockwell distributes his frozen wares to the local children, and they promptly turn into homicidal little creatures staring blankly into space and sporting severely discolored lips. They go after their adult prey with such demonic enthusiasm it makes you wonder why George Romero never thought of the idea, a sort of “Bugsy Malone of the Living Dead.”

One hopes Roth has gotten his worst instincts out with this effort, which, considering that it comes from the maker of such films as Cabin Fever, Hostel and Thanksgiving, is saying something.

The silent, perpetually smiling ice cream truck vendor, played chillingly by Canadian actor Ari Millen (Orphan Black), is certainly a creepy figure who could give Art the Clown in the Terrifier movies a run for his money. Except that the Ice Cream Man is less a psycho killer than an evil enabler, one whose frozen treats turn otherwise normal children into pint-sized killing machines displaying remarkable ingenuity in their methods of slaughter. The Ice Cream Man does pitch in at times, including serving a teacher’s scooped-out brains to him in a cone.

The little darlings, who include a girl who walks around the neighborhood holding her mother’s severed head like a trophy, display the usual playfulness of summer campers. They also seek to swell their ranks by force-feeding the ice cream to any fellow children who haven’t yet been infected. Their carnage — exemplified in a lengthy, virtuosic sequence in which they attack the adult teachers and employees at their grade school with frenzied abandon — includes the sort of gruesome playground activities involving severed body parts that makes one hope the child actors had recourse to on-set psychiatric counseling.

There’s a backstory of sorts, told by a local priest (Benjamin Byron Davis) and involving a travesty of justice followed by revenge facilitated by a necromancer. But it almost seems unnecessary, since the film’s true raison d’etre is demonstrating the amazing talents of its prosthetics designers, who have created such a relentless series of horrific bodily images that it’s easy to imagine blood-crazed audiences applauding them like musical numbers. The reliance on practical effects rather than the CGI employed by so many current horror films at least proves refreshing.

The visuals are also packed with throwaway jokes, including one drive-by decapitation that should be accompanied by a rim shot, and deadpan visual flourishes like a crow pecking out the eyes of a corpse in the foreground of a shot.

There have been plenty of horror movies involving murderous children over the years, such as Village of the Damned and its sequel and, of course, Children of the Corn. But Roth doesn’t hide his desire to outdo them all with this effort that can only be described as sick and twisted. And I’m sure he’ll take that as a compliment.