“Jimmy really liked mazes where there’s many different stories,” Miller says. “That’s how the idea came up to have this be his nightmares, where all these discombobulated things can weave together.”
Asked whether any of the scares come directly from Fallon’s own nightmares, Miller and O’Connor both indicate that the host never ‘fessed up to what goes on inside his mind after dark. That said, they did take note of how quickly Fallon tossed out pitches for the different scares visitors would encounter.
“Jimmy would come up with five or six ideas in a matter of seconds,” O’Connor says, laughing. “He’d be like, ‘Creepy gas stations!’ These were things he’d clearly been thinking about.”
The finished Tonightmares experience lasts roughly ten minutes and sends groups of eight visitors through a series of twisty passageways leading to ten eerie environments—like the aforementioned creepy gas station and haunted cornfield—where an enthusiastic cast of “scareactors” lurk, ready to provide a close encounter of the freaky kind.
Meanwhile, Fallon’s disembodied voice provides narration, and an undead NBC page guides the groups through each of the nightmares, a touch that’s both authentic to The Tonight Show brand and a practical way to avoid traffic jams.
“They can get 800 people an hour through the maze or something crazy like that,” Miller says with obvious admiration for the Haunted Horror Nights team’s crowd control prowess. “The guide has to bring you through the story, so we thought: ‘Who’s a better guide than a zombie page?’”
Space walk
From the jump (scare), Miller envisioned Tonightmares as an “only at 30 Rock” experience. But real estate at NBCUniversal’s flagship location comes at a premium—not to mention with a lot less square footage than the Halloween Horror Nights team is accustomed to working with.
“We needed to fill up an entire space, but only for four months,” the showrunner explains, adding that alternate locations in Manhattan were considered. “But I wanted it at 30 Rock; that’s part of the mystique of this.”
