This spooky season, there’s something scarier at Rockefeller Center than a Jenna Maroney-hosted Halloween party. The iconic Manhattan location is hosting Jimmy Fallon’s Tonightmares, The Tonight Show host’s first foray into the haunted maze craze that sweeps through theme parks and other family-friendly venues every October.

Open through Oct. 31, Tonightmares invites the brave and the bold to venture into Fallon’s nightmares and dreamscapes, populated by werewolves, killer robots, and mad scientists… oh my! The experience partnered NBC’s Tonight Show creative team with the mad geniuses behind Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights.

And according to Tonight Show producer/showrunner Chris Miller, it was the most successfully scary team-up since Freddy met Jason. 

“When Jimmy and I went down to Universal Orlando to meet with the creative team, we were so pumped and excited,” Miller tells ADWEEK, recalling the experience of touring an in-progress version of the park’s Horror Nights experience. “Jimmy became fascinated with how it all worked and all the scares. After that, he literally started taking meetings that I wasn’t even in!”

Fallon’s passion—or, put in spookier terms, obsession—with haunted mazecraft also impressed David O’Connor, president of franchise management and brand strategy at NBC Universal. “He had this vision for it,” O’Connor recalls. “Once I started to hear his ideas, I got excited, too.”

Dream a little dream

According to Miller, the idea for Tonightmares sprouted in his and Fallon’s minds several years ago, but it only really flowered during last year’s late night TV shutdown amidst the WGA and SAG strikes. At first, the duo shouted out specific scares rather than tying them to any overall theme; O’Connor remembers Fallon being particularly drawn to cornfield scarecrows—a phobia the executive also shared thanks to the movie version of Stephen King’s Children of the Corn.

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