Ice Cream Man (2026) Ending Explained – Who Was Really in the Grave?
Welcome to Knockout Horror. Today in “articles I am not sure why I am writing because people hated this film“, we are going to be explaining the ending to Eli Roth’s latest train wreck Ice Cream Man (2026).
There’s probably a few people who would think I should avoid even talking about this movie due to AI usage but that would be a bit hypocritical given the fact that movies like Late Night with the Devil and V/H/S/Halloween used AI, too. People love talking about those films. My readers want an ending explanation and I am here to provide it.
With that being said, I won’t ignore the issue completely. If you want to read along to me ranting about how Eli Roth’s use of AI in this film is a terrible sign of things to come, click the link. If you would like to check out my opinion on the film, take a look at my spoiler-free Ice Cream Man review. Otherwise, let’s explain this ending right after our ND-Friendly ending in brief.
⚠️ Warning: Major spoilers follow below.
The Ending in Brief
The TL;DR: The entire “resurrection ritual” given to the kids by the local priest was actually a setup. The priest isn’t really a priest at all; he’s the necromancer who originally bargained for Jonathan Smiley’s soul decades ago. He has been working with the cursed ice cream man all this time to plan this absolutely ridiculous and hilariously convoluted con-job. Desperate to stop Jonathan and free their possessed classmates, Jared and Lizzie dig up the unmarked grave by the river maple. Entirely believing that they are executing the necromancer and his siren, just as the priest told them to do, they don’t realise that they have been tricked. It isn’t the necromancer and his siren in the grave at all, it’s their own parents. They had been kidnapped and placed in the grave deliberately so that the kids would be the ones to unintentionally murder them. With Chris stabbed, Tommy and Mia force-fed the cursed ice cream, and the town’s adult population all but gone, Jonathan Smiley departs Bayleen Bay with a group of possessed children to bring his vengeance to the next town, I guess (?), leaving Jared and Lizzie devastated.
Who Survived? Only Jared and his sister Lizzie survive the night intact. Their classmate friends Tommy and Mia, along with the rest of the town’s youth, still survive as brainwashed, possessed servants under Jonathan’s control but they get free ice cream which is pretty cool. Their parents, Lizzie’s ex-boyfriend Chris, the corrupt town priest, and all the local adults and teachers are dead… and perhaps Eli Roth’s directorial career, too?
Why did Jonathan Smiley target Bayleen Bay? Decades earlier, Jonathan was a harmless, kind-hearted immigrant vendor who was framed for crimes against local children to cover up abuses committed by the town’s own predatory clergy. Jared’s influential lawyer grandfather, Milton Mayfair, coerced the town’s children into giving false testimonies on the stand which led to Smiley’s conviction as a child predator. In prison, Jonathan traded his soul to a necromancer to return years later and exact sweet, sweet revenge on the corrupt families who destroyed his life. This is the reason why Jared’s parents were targeted specifically; they were the direct descendants of the person who ruined his life.
Why didn’t Mia eat the ice cream? It’s implied that Mia has an eating disorder like Bulimia and is forcing herself to be sick after eating to retain a slim physique. She ate the ice cream and then made herself sick – very tasteful!
Why didn’t Jared or Lizzie get possessed right away? Jared avoided eating the treats from the start due to his lactose intolerance. When Lizzie inadvertently ate some of the ice cream, it paralysed her as it apparently doesn’t work on teens. She shoved a toothbrush down her throat to make herself vomit which allowed her to regain her mobility.
Table of Contents
The Ice Cream Man (2026) Ending Explained
Don’t worry, as always, we don’t do plot recaps on Knockout Horror. I’m even more certain than I normally am that you don’t want to have to sit through that all over again in text form. Let’s explain the ending to Ice Cream Man. Let’s kick things off with the entire reason the Ice Cream Man exists in the first place… The villain that is, not the movie.
Who is the Ice Cream Man? The Frame-Up: The Sins of Milton Mayfair
The ice cream man is a supernatural character who was previously a kind-hearted, immigrant ice cream vendor called Jonathan Smiley. Smiley died in a prison cell decades before but has been resurrected by a necromancer to take revenge on the people who put him in prison.
The best way to explain the ice cream man, as a character, is by looking at him as something of a mirror-image inversion of Freddy Kruger from A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Freddy Kruger was a child predator who managed to escape punishment by getting off on a technicality. As a result, he was attacked and burned alive by the angry townsfolk in an act of revenge for his crimes. Freddy sold his soul to the Dream Demons and, when he resurrected, he took his hatred out on the children of the townsfolk as his own form of vengeance against them.
Freddy is, essentially, an evil bastard who managed to rekindle his reign of terror in the afterlife.
Jonathan Smiley is the opposite. Smiley was a good guy who came to the USA, seemingly, from an Eastern European country and tried his best to make a good life for himself as a hard working ice cream vendor. He loved bringing joy to children.
When abuses committed by the town’s religious leaders threatened a massive public scandal, they needed a scapegoat.
They hired Jared’s grandfather, prominent defense attorney Milton Mayfair, to do the dirty work. He orchestrated a plot to pin the abuse claims on Jonathan Smiley, due to his limited connections and inability to fight back, by forcing local children to lie on the witness stand and say he had committed horrible acts against them.
Smiley was convicted and, while rotting in a prison cell for crimes he didn’t do, he made a pact with a necromancer. The necromancer would claim Smiley’s soul and, in return, he would give Smiley an opportunity to take vengeance on the people who wronged him.
Thematic Spotlight: Generational Guilt and Institutional Abuse
The Ice Cream Man is quite amusing because, despite its splatter carnage and terrible usage of AI, it’s trying really hard to act as a troubling allegory for inherited institutional guilt and the weaponisation of children. Decades ago, the adults of Bayleen Bay fed their own children lies to destroy an innocent man’s life and that’s about to come back on them in the worst way.
In the present, Jonathan literally feeds those adults’ children a sweet poison that turns them into bloodthirsty little bastards. The parents who built their comfortable lives on a foundation of lies and silence are slaughtered by the very offspring they lied to provide for. Jared’s family legacy, the Mayfair legal firm, was founded on deceit, making his family’s destruction the main goal of Jonathan’s killing spree.
The Priest was Actually the Necromancer? The Priest’s False Salvation
The priest who Jared, Tommy, and Mia speak to in the walk-in freezer of the church wasn’t actually a priest, at all. It was the necromancer that Jonathan Smiley made the bargain with. He was masquerading as a priest to lure Jared into a trap.
When Jared, Tommy, and Mia flee the school massacre and take shelter in Grace Church, they stumble into a walk-in freezer stocked with Jonathan’s treats, finding the parish priest huddled in the cold supposedly hiding there.
The priest paints himself as a repentant whistleblower who was silenced by the diocese years ago. He relates the story of how Jonathan Smiley was framed decades before and how Smiley had made a pact with a necromancer to take revenge on the town, hence the events taking place at the moment.
He offers the kids a very specific method to stop Jonathan: find the unmarked grave by the river maple that the necromancer is hiding in, decapitate the cloaked necromancer, and execute the siren that will be with him. Once the head has been removed, hold it up to the ice cream man. This will break the curse and the children will be restored to normal.
The priest even stages a dramatic “sacrifice” to allow the kids to escape, drawing Jonathan’s attention to give them time to get out of the freezer.
In reality, the priest wasn’t a priest at all, he was the necromancer in disguise. The entire narrative he related to them was actually a calculated manipulation designed to steer Jared and Lizzie into performing the final blow of Jonathan’s revenge plan themselves.
Survival Breakdown: How the Unpossessed Stayed Sane
Jonathan Smiley’s ice cream, obviously, acts as a mind-control agent for the children. It places any kid who ingested it under his total control. Only a handful of youths actually managed to avoid or purge the poison but who were they and why?
- Jared Mayfair: Avoided eating the ice cream entirely from the beginning due to his lactose intolerance. Funnily enough, ice cream tends to have enough fat in it to not spark a major reaction in most cases of lactose intolerance but, hey, plot holes are the least of this movie’s problems.
- Lizzie Mayfair: Ate the ice cream and became paralysed, which by all accounts is exactly what the ice cream does to teens. I would assume so they aren’t able to help protect the adults but also aren’t likely to be killed by the children. She broke free from the demonic control by using a toothbrush to force herself to vomit the treat back up on the advice of Mia.
- Mia: Ate the treat initially but seemingly has an eating disorder like bulimia so purged immediately after by making herself vomit. (She is later forcibly fed the ice cream again in the cemetery).
- Tommy: He wanted to grab some ice cream but noticed the rest of his friends acting bizarre and never really gets a chance to before realising it is the ice cream making them wig out. (Like Mia, he is eventually cornered and force-fed the ice cream at the graveyard).
Who Was in the Grave? The Cemetery Twist
When Lizzie and Jared decapitate, who they believe is, the necromancer in the grave, they quickly realise they have been duped. The grave actually contained both of their parents. Their father was dressed as the necromancer and their mother was dressed as the siren.
At the cemetery, Chris distracts the swarm of possessed kids before being overpowered and murdered. Tommy and Mia are cornered and force-fed the ice cream, immediately becoming mindless lunatics.
Jared and Lizzie, realising that it’s up to them to end the madness, frantically unearth the unmarked grave, locate the cloaked figures, and begin attacking them with the hopes that it will sever the demonic link, restoring their friends to normality. Jared beheads the necromancer and goes to hold up the head to the Ice Cream Man who throws up his hands in horror.
The truth drops immediately after, however: there was never a sleeping necromancer or a mythical siren in the dirt. The bodies in the grave were Jared and Lizzie’s unconscious parents, placed there specifically to be unwittingly slaughtered by their own children.
The priest was the necromancer all along, having visited Jonathan in prison decades prior to broker the unholy deal, only to reappear in the church basement to trick the Mayfair bloodline into executing their own family.
The Ice Cream Man (2026): Kill Count
Ice Cream Man may have been a shit-fest of a film but it definitely leaned into splatter carnage. The movie turned into a massacre with a ridiculous number of deaths. Here is the confirmed list of casualties but I am sure there are a few missing here and there:
- Panicked Teacher
- Officer Salinger
- Terry
- Jogger
- Principal Maloney
- Mr. Hamlin
- Mr. Browning
- Chris
- Miles
- Barry Farber
- Jonathan Smiley (Original mortal human death)
- Roger
- Marty Mayfair (Eli Roth in a guest spot)
- Heather Henderson
- Mrs. Valentine
- Alison Mayfair
- Terrified Teacher
- Old Lady
- Benji’s Mom
- Melissa
- Fran Farber
Shout out to Cinemorgue for clarity on those names. That’s pretty much every adult in the entire town. Again, not a great film but there were definitely enough deaths to go around, and then some.
Why Did the Ice Cream Man Target Jared and Lizzie? Generational Trauma
The Ice Cream Man targeted Jared, specifically, and Lizzie because they are the direct descendants of the person who framed him and sent him to prison – Milton Mayfair. Tricking Jared into killing his own parents would mean Smiley had managed to murder the offspring of Milton while directly passing the trauma they caused him onto his descendants – Jared and Lizzie.
The ice cream man was very specific in choosing his victims. The majority of the residents of the town were actually, at one point, the children who falsely testified against him years before. The movie is set decades later so they are adults now. He wanted them to die but his primary targets were the direct descendants of Milton Mayfair – Jared, Lizzie, and their parents.
In fact, Jared and Lizzie’s parents also testified against Jonathan Smiley in court when they were kids. Tricking Jared and Lizzie into murdering them meant he not only took revenge on Milton by killing his direct descendants, but he also took revenge on two of the children who falsely testified against him, all while passing the trauma he felt onto Milton Mayfair’s grandchildren. It was a triple hitter.
What Does the Final Scene Mean?
The final scenes of Ice Cream Man indicates that Jared and Lizzie are now forced to live with the same guilt, grief, and feeling of being wronged that Jonathan Smiley did after being tricked into killing their own parents. It also hints that Smiley may move on with his demented horde of children to take out his anger on other corrupt towns.
The closing moments see an understandably traumatised Jared and Lizzie stranded in the ruins of Bayleen Bay. Jonathan Smiley starts up his ice cream truck and rolls out of town, followed by the possessed children who have slaughtered their parents and erased all of the town’s adult population.
Again, this movie is utterly ridiculous but Roth attempts to key in on a couple of important narrative points, here:
1. Permanent Generational Trauma: Jonathan had no intention of simply killing Jared and Lizzie. By tricking them into murdering their own parents, he is forcing them to carry the same unbearable burden of guilt, grief, and wrongful blood that was placed onto him decades earlier. It’s like a cyclical form of punishment that will ruin their lives and those of any children they have.
2. An Unstoppable Cycle of Violence: As the ice cream truck drives off toward the next unsuspecting community, the film makes it clear that Jonathan’s soul wasn’t about to evaporate the second he took his revenge. He can now move onto other corrupt towns with his group of murderous little bastards and take further vengeance on the dark hypocrisies of suburban America.
Final Thoughts: It was Pretty Awful
The Ice Cream Man was pretty terrible, let’s be honest. It’s derivative, the killings get old fast, and the usage of AI is a terrible sign of where movie making is going. Horror is a genre that depends on the little people and the more we accept the replacement of those little people with machines, the worse the entire industry will be. Still, it had some chuckle worthy kills.
Thanks for reading! If you love digging through ending explanations without getting bogged down in fluff, stick around and check out some of our other Ending Explained breakdowns, browse our horror reviews, or take a look at our curated horror movie lists.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was in the unmarked grave?
Jared and Lizzie’s parents were in the unmarked grave. The priest, who was actually a necromancer, tricked the kids into believing they were killing an ancient necromancer and a siren, forcing them to unwittingly murder their own mother and father.
Who was the real necromancer?
The local priest hiding in the church walk-in freezer was the necromancer. Decades earlier, he made the pact with Jonathan Smiley in prison to help him exact supernatural revenge on Bayleen Bay. In exchange, he would take Smiley’s soul.
Why was Jonathan Smiley convicted in the past?
Jonathan was framed by the town leadership to cover up crimes committed by predatory priests. Jared’s grandfather, Milton Mayfair, coerced the town’s children into providing false witness testimonies against Jonathan in court.
Do Tommy and Mia survive at the end?
Tommy and Mia survive physically, but they are force-fed the ice cream by their peers and become part of Jonathan’s possessed army of children at the end of the film.
A Note on Ending Explanations
While we aim to provide comprehensive explanations based on the events on screen, film analysis is inherently subjective. The theories and conclusions presented in this "Ending Explained" feature are personal interpretations of the material and may differ from the director's original intent or your own understanding. That's the beauty of horror, right? Sometimes the scariest version is the one you build in your own head.
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