Go Inside Jimmy Fallon’s Tonightmares… If You Dare

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.

“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.”

Working with Tishman Speyer—the real estate company that licenses space at 30 Rock—the Tonightmares crew initially looked into setting up shop in a former basement post office before settling on an empty space below the Lego Store on Fifth Ave. But when Miller first entered his soon-to-be haunted home away from home, he wasn’t sure how it would fit one scary scenario, let alone ten.

“It’s not that big a space, but we’ve really made the best of every square inch,” he marvels. The Tonightmares transformation also allowed for some welcome upgrades to the existing room, including a newly installed HVAC system and ADA-compliant exits.

“When we first saw the space, it was nothing but concrete and wires,” O’Connor recalls. “It was impressive to see it come to life in its finished form with lightning, practical effects, and actors.”

Miller says that accommodating a full ensemble of “scareactors” is one of the other tricks of the haunted maze trade he most enjoyed discovering.

“They’re the ones that have to hit the button or the foot pedal that create the scares,” he says. “And depending on the group, they’ll know which person to go after and get to scream so everyone else will scream. This isn’t an animated ride at Disneyland—it’s a haunted house! So real people doing the scaring is key.”

Wake in fright

Halloween’s evolution from a one-night candy run for children into a month-long all-ages celebration of the macabre has certainly benefitted theme parks and other live event arenas. And Tonightmares is doing its part to increase 30 Rock foot traffic; when ADWEEK visited the maze on a recent Sunday, the admission line wrapped around the building’s underground hallways.

“People are like, ‘I can’t believe this is a temporary thing—it looks like a movie set,’” Miller says of the overall reaction. It helps that The Tonight Show has also kept up a steady promotional drumbeat, with Fallon escorting celebrities like Prince Harry, Savanah Guthrie, Hoda Kotb, and Demi Lovato through his demonic brainchild.

The Tonight Show/Halloween Horror Nights crossover is the kind of in-company synergy that O’Connor likes to see, especially when it pops up outside of a Universal Studios park.

“People love these experiences, and I think it tells you that there’s this appetite in markets that are probably a little underserved,” he notes, suggesting that there could be an “opportunity to expand” NBCUniversal’s immersive horror offerings going forward.

For his part, Miller says that he and Fallon are more than game to conjure up another batch of Tonightmares next Halloween.

“I would love it if this became our yearly thing,” the showrunner says. “Halloween has become this massive consumer event, and it wasn’t like that when I was a kid! The pumpkins went out, and that was it.”