Photo: NBC/Todd Owyoung/NBC
Note: This post contains scare spoilers for Jimmy Fallon’s Tonightmares.
You are in Jimmy Fallon’s bedroom. It’s a dark, dank, chilly space, bathed in an eerie musty fog that laps at your ankles. You take in your surroundings, noticing a half-open picture book and shivering at the sight of the murky green glow emanating from under Jimmy’s bed. You hear his voice echoing around you, but you cannot see him. This is terrifying. You feel the need to escape, to hide. So you hightail it into Jimmy’s closet, his hung-up clothes hitting you in the face as you push through. The closet was a mistake. It leads to a small black antechamber, and now you find yourself somewhere far more terrifying.
You are in Jimmy Fallon’s mind. (Cue Wilhelm scream.)
This is the premise of Jimmy Fallon’s Tonightmares, a concept so demented that it could only have come from the twisted imagination of the man who brought you “All About That Bass” performed on xylophone. You thought it was funny when he used to break? Well, now Jimmy’s gonna break you. Jimmy Fallon’s Tonightmares is a new haunted attraction from NBCUniversal and the creative team at The Tonight Show. To fans of high-production-value themed experiences and people who like to get into the holiday spirit regardless of the holiday, this is a huge deal. Up until now, Rockefeller Center — with its skating rink, Radio City Music Hall Rockettes, and big, big, big, big, big, big tree — has pretty much owned Christmas in this town. It’s a logical next step to turn the complex into a destination for another major holiday, filling a Jekyll & Hyde Club–shaped hole in the city’s Halloween market. What isn’t so much a logical next step as it is an illogical zig-zaggy cartwheel is the decision to theme this immersive haunted experience after “Jimmy Fallon’s spine-tingling nightmares.” What do the inside of Fallon’s nightmares even look like? A messy breakup with the Roots? A workplace exposé? I went to the heart of darkness to find out just how haunted the inside of Fallon’s psyche really is and to determine if it’s worth your time, money, and screams.
One thing I really appreciate about Tonightmares is how it’s situated in the basement of Rockefeller Center. It adds a layer of authenticity and immersion to the experience to enter past the Atlas statue in front of 630 Fifth Avenue and to know that Fallon is napping in his office just an elevator ride away. Like Life and Trust or Muppet-Vision 3*D, it’s a site-specific installation that thematically plays with its surroundings, and I simply love that kind of thing. Other Halloween experiences out in the suburbs or the countryside might take place in an abandoned barn or warehouse; Tonightmares takes place on the concourse level in an abandoned AllSaints. A haunted house inside of a cavernous symbol of the demise of physical retail? Chilling!
After descending the escalator, I went through a metal detector and took note of the warning sign, which cautioned visitors not to enter the experience if they have a medical sensitivity to strobe lights or fog, suffer from a fear of enclosed spaces, or have undergone recent surgery. Then, a very enthusiastic staff member gave my group a pre-attraction safety spiel before ushering us through the doors. My group consisted of me, Vulture features editor and immersive-experience buff Megh Wright, and two tall, well-dressed gay strangers. This was greatly advantageous because I am a wimp and a coward, and it’s helpful to have tall people walk directly in front of me through a haunted house. They were sort of like landmine-sniffing rats, detonating all of the jumpscares and surprises so they didn’t happen directly in my face. Because this is a Jimmy Fallon–themed experience, Megh asked a staff member if it was “funny-scary” or “scary-scary,” and she said it was “scary-scary” and not recommended for children under the age of 13. I braced myself for A24-level horror.
Through the doors, we found ourselves in a pre-show room themed like a decrepit elevator-loading dock. It was filled with rusty pipes and flickering lights, complete with a wall of old control switches. The vibes evoked the loading zone of Disney World’s Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, which is probably the world’s premiere spooky destination in terms of artistry and design. This was our first exposure to a crucial element of the Tonightmares experience: Jimmy’s voice-over guiding us throughout the experience and putting us in the headspace of being in his headspace. “This is exactly how all of my Tonightmares start,” his disembodied voice said with the overly theatrical heebie-jeebies of a Scooby-Doo character. “Wake up, Jimmy, wake up!” This attraction’s commitment to using the word “Tonightmares” instead of “nightmares” at every opportunity is admirable and funny.
After Jimmy set the scene, the “down” light lit up red, the elevator doors opened, and we were ushered inside to a room that simulated a moving elevator, with lights coming through cracks in the walls to evoke downward motion. In voice-over, Jimmy expressed that all of his Tonightmares begin this way: in an elevator with a suspiciously thin, old-looking rope suspending it in the shaft. Then the rope “snapped,” the lights went out, and Jimmy’s voice-over suggested we were “falling.” As an introductory experience that transitions visitors from the mortal realm to the netherworld of Jimmy Fallon’s sadistic dreams, this sequence feels directly inspired by the famous Stretching Room in the Haunted Mansion. Fallon’s a theme-park fan (heck, he’s a theme-park attraction), and the theme-parkiness of this experience is where it shines.
From an operational standpoint, this attraction needs a guide for each group to keep the timing on track, making sure they enter each room as the audio, special effects, and scare actors all reset. The guides in Tonightmares are cleverly dressed like Spooky NBC Pages; Jimmy’s voic-eover introduced our guide to us as Taylor, saying, “Taylor’s in all my Tonightmares.” Our Taylor had an Igor-like disposition, and she really gave this wordless performance her all. Tonightmares features ten set pieces, and before each one, Taylor would hold us in a small, dark room, where Jimmy’s voice-over would set the scene for what we were about to witness and an unrhyming couplet was projected on a card on the wall. It was unclear whether these were supposed to evoke index cards a late-night host like Fallon would hold while doing monologue jokes or “pages” of a story book, but they kept the fear factor in check with their goofy-doofy tone. For example, Fallon would say, “Oh no, this one’s my scariest Tonightmare yet. I’m onstage with my favorite boy band, Bloodengutz, and they’re hungry for … blood and guts!” As a scaredy-cat who’s susceptible to getting too creeped out by tone and mood, I appreciated these interludes in all their silly Jimminess.
As for the set pieces themselves, the only thing that really disappointed me about Tonightmares is how generic most of Fallon’s deepest fears are: a mad scientist, a serial killer, aliens hunting you down. Basic. The highlights were the rooms that felt specific to the overall theme of the experience, like the Tonightmare in which Fallon is the host of a 1950s talk show who gets bit by a puppy and turned into a werewolf. The room was themed like the backstage of an old late-night show with black-and-white TVs showing Fallon in horn-rimmed glasses handling a golden retriever. Behind a larger, illuminated screen, which was meant to look like a thin divider between onstage and off, we could see “shadows” of Fallon transforming into the werewolf before a scare actor popped out for an in-person “attack” and a second one jumped us from behind. Another standout Tonightmare was a condemned warehouse full of recalled AI robots. As we walked through the narrow pathway, we were surrounded on either side by rows of human-size robot dummies standing upright in their boxes — some frozen in place, others actual human actors lunging forward at us. I appreciated them going to the trouble because if this NBCUniversal haunted house wanted to make a room about the rise of artificial intelligence, they could have just played a recording of their own upfront ad-sales presentation and called it a day.
What excited me so much in the first place about Jimmy Fallon’s Tonightmares, besides the Mad Libs–ass nature of its very existence, was that it was developed by the design team behind Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios’ parks in Orlando and Hollywood. I asked this Saw trap’s Jigsaw himself, Jimmy Fallon, about this after successfully escaping his Tonightmares. Lit up with the sort of excitement he normally reserves for making Ariana Grande spin a wheel of musical impressions, he told me that he “met with the people from Universal and asked, ‘What if I bring Halloween Horror Nights to New York?’ And they said no,” but eventually they relented and he got to spitball with “these real nerds” (he meant it affectionately) about ideas like spooky scarecrows and the like. The brief chat confirmed what I already knew to be true: Universal’s creatives are the best in the biz, and we need a non-Disney-copyrighted term for “Imagineer” to describe them because we’ve got to do better than “real nerds.”
I used to deliberately avoid haunted houses and be firmly anti-scare, and the thing that converted me was attending Halloween Horror Nights in Orlando in 2022. These houses featured some of the most elaborate, creative production design I’ve ever witnessed in person, full of the sorts of practical effects you just don’t see in movies anymore and based around a blend of IP tie-ins and wildly original concepts. A few rooms in Tonightmares captured that unique theme-park-y thing I adore so much: environments themed to make you feel like you’re outdoors at night, when in fact you’re indoors during the day. Based on Tonightmares rooms like the abandoned gas station and the haunted cornfield (with large hanging ropes hitting you in the face to simulate … the corn?), I wouldn’t be surprised if Fallon shares my hyperfixation. The forested alien room, in particular, reminded me of Steven Spielberg’s greatest achievement: the queue for the E.T. ride at Universal Studios Orlando.
These professional HHN scare designers are very good at what they do, and an injection of those blockbuster-production values into Midtown shows up other cash-grabby “immersive” experiences like those tacky pop-ups and “museums” about ice cream and Friends. Where those are centered around Instagram photo ops, Tonightmares just wants you to live in the moment — no phones, just vibes and scares. At the end of the attraction, there was a photo op, which did that classic haunted-house thing of having a jumpscare the second the flash goes off. At the kiosk at the end of the attraction where I downloaded my pictures, the attendant listened to the commotion in the photo-op room, sighed happily, and told me, “I love hearing the screams.”
All of this leads us to the question: Should you go to Jimmy Fallon’s Tonightmares? Is it worth it? The experience takes around 15 minutes, and tickets range from $35 to $45, depending on the date and time. Recent guest Prince Harry seems to have been properly jolted, and that man has seen things. On a pure scare level, my braver-than-I colleague Megh was unimpressed, but I appreciated that it was an amount of scary that I could handle, with Jimmy’s voice-over keeping the tone light. I think people who like Orlando-coded things in the heart of Midtown — who appreciate the immersive thrills of 4DX and the Top of the Rock Beam and the stupid fun of Margaritaville Times Square — will find this worth the cost of admission. People who want a truly haunting experience can visit the American Girl Doll store just upstairs.
Related
Jimmy Fallon Might Be Laughing a Little Less Than UsualUniversal Studios Is Making a Girlboss Haunted House
