Eli Roth

**SPEAKER_1** (0:05)
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**Chris Hardwick** (0:30)
Hello and welcome to I Think You're Overthinking It, episode number 1171 I hope you're having a nice summer here in 2026 If you need this timestamped and you're listening to this years from now, or you're an alien civilization millions of years from now using advanced translation software to decode this ancient language, and this one specific podcast about what it is. You're going to have a lot of movies to catch up on. By the way, movies were like visual interpretations of stories that we could record and watch over and over and over again. By the way, back to the present in 2026, speaking of visual, if you want to see I Think You're Overthinking It, you can do that for it is now in Watch-O-Vision. You can see it on AMC Plus or YouTube or Spotify.
So go watch it if you want to or just keep listening to it. Honestly, any way that you do it is much appreciated. Thank you so, so much. This episode is Eli Roth, whom I've known for many, many, many years, as has my wife, who knew Eli separately before she and I ever even knew each other. So he's been on the podcast a bunch and just such a sweet guy and obviously one of the modern horror masters. We have a great conversation about kind of the evolution of horror and talk about the wave of early 21st century horror that was ushered in from folks like Rob Zombie, from the House of a Thousand Corpses, which I am quite familiar with, and also Eli and James Wan, and just sort of talk about how it all kind of came together in this modern horror era that we live in. Eli has a new movie out called Ice Cream Man. It is in theaters August 7th, 2026 And for the Future Alien Civilization Theaters are places where we would go collectively as a group in person to see a thing play on a big flat surface with really good sound.
So it sort of looked like what your what your bridge may look like if Star Trek is to be believed. Huh, there's a big screen.
I should have bailed on this Future Alien bit a while ago. I'm not cutting it out though. This is a one taker, this intro. Thank you for your patience and kindness. This is episode number 1171 of I Think You're Overthinking It as we start the thing.
Abundanza. That's not a, that's an American frozen pizza word.

**Eli Roth** (3:45)
This is a marketing executive who cast an old woman and said, you are Mama Celeste, and your catchphrase is now Abundanza.

**Chris Hardwick** (3:54)
Well, now we have to tell the story because now we've started recording that your wife is Italian.

**Eli Roth** (4:00)
Yes.

**Chris Hardwick** (4:01)
I don't just mean of Italian descent, she is Italian.

**Eli Roth** (4:03)
Like we met in Florence, and during the pandemic, I went to Italy, and I moved into her apartment, and we were like FaceTiming with my family. We were like, well, we're about to have dinner because you know, you're nine hours ahead, and it's their morning. Then my dad went, Abundanza.
We hung out with my wife, Victoria looks at me, she's like, what did your father just say? She's like, Yiddish, and I was like, Abundanza. Pizza for one, and she's like, what do you mean?

**Chris Hardwick** (4:28)
Did you have to explain like the concept of like, just cheap frozen pizzas?

**Eli Roth** (4:32)
First of all, that was another thing. She's like, wait a minute, why would you even have the need for frozen pizza? If it's, I was like, well, you know, you come home drunk in high school and you want to watch wrestling in the basement, then you put on, you know, there's frozen pizza. But she's like, but why would you eat a frozen pizza when you can just have like, why wouldn't there be fresh made pizza from scratch in your house or around the corner? Or you just, on your way home, you stop and you get pizza at two in the morning from the guy making it fresh. Like the whole concept of frozen pizza was another discussion. But then explaining Abundanza and I go on YouTube and I showed her the commercial. She's like, yeah, that's a lie.