Do we like Eli Roth?
Our score: 5 out of 10. No record of harm to LGBTQ+ people and some real good, set against a reported post wishing violence on an activist and a walked-back claim about AI.
Eli Roth grew up in a Jewish family in Newton, Massachusetts, started making movies on a Super 8 camera at about eight after watching Alien, and graduated from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in 1993. He made his name with the splatter-horror films Cabin Fever and Hostel, and later acted for Quentin Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds.
In his own telling, horror is meant to be a bit rebellious. He has said there is something “transgressive and punk rock about horror films”. In a 2023 interview he also dodged talk of politics and his personal life, so there's not a lot of Roth-on-his-beliefs to go on.
The ugliest moment on the record is June 2025. After Israeli forces stopped a Gaza-bound aid boat carrying Greta Thunberg, screenshots of Roth's Instagram stories reportedly showed him writing that she “needs to be eaten by cannibals”. A second story reportedly told anyone who shared what he called her propaganda that they were dead to him. The screenshots were not independently verified, and no apology turned up in anything we read. Italian coverage said Thunberg did not respond, and that many commenters condemned the posts.
That's the harm check, and it's the only entry on it. We found no words or acts from him against LGBTQ+ people, women or migrants, and no vaccine or election conspiracy stuff. But a joke about a young climate activist being eaten is still a wish of violence aimed at someone campaigning for the planet. Where you land depends on whether you read it as a dark-humour horror director being tasteless in a heated week, or as something nastier. We'd call it a mark against him either way.
The recent bit is the AI stoush. Roth first told Polygon that he drew the cartoon sequence in Ice Cream Man himself, with animators helping. When the credits listed an AI visual effects studio, Dark Half, he said he “misspoke” and that AI was used in a very small portion of a few scenes. Variety reported that his reps and Dark Half hadn't answered its first request for comment, and the film's Rotten Tomatoes score sat at 29 per cent.
The fallout reached Mexico, where Festival Macabro pulled the film from its lineup. Its statement gave no specific reason. Uno TV tied the move to follower comments about both the AI use and the Thunberg post, and to calls to boycott in support of Palestine. Roth hadn't responded to that, as far as the report goes.