Inside Six Flags' Cinematic Halloween Treat

TMA channels nightmare horror tropes

Halloween’s a huge traffic driver for theme parks, and in 2024 Six Flags and TMA leaned into the connection between horror movie fans and people who crave real-life jolts in scare zones and haunted mazes.

At that time, we didn’t wait for a brief. We aligned on a simple strategy: Don’t just show the scares. Make people feel them. And then we wrote “Tick, Tick, Tick” to hit that overlap in audiences. We planned how to pull it off in one overnight shoot on a modest budget, and brought it to the brand as a turnkey package. Kudos to them for being so brave and saying “yes.”

It was a big swing, but it worked. Fans went nuts, we won some awards and AI crowned it the scariest ad ever. (Thanks, robot overlords.)

John (Suits, co-director at Natural Selection) and I started talking months ago about how to follow that up. Last year’s piece was a long-form ad to drive ticket sales. But this year, we wanted to make pure branded entertainment—figuring the content could speak for itself and appeal to our younger audience. No need for an overt sale. And we wanted to shift tone into an A24 scary vibe, using sound design and unsettling imagery to drop horror fans into the middle of a nightmare.

We also wanted to create original IP for the parks. But since the venues already leverage incredible properties like the Conjuring Universe, Saw and Leatherface, that bar’s really high.

All that led us to creating Smiley, a 7-foot tall, face-stealing woodland freak. A huge shout-out to Hugo Villasenor for his brilliant creature design.

“Tick, Tick, Tick” was a chamber piece. But for the new one, “Come Out and Play,” we had the chance to shoot inside Magic Mountain. So, we reverse-engineered the short around the ad’s beats. Every setting (even the back-of-the-house penultimate scene) served both the ad and the storyline.

The shoot was a whip. Day 1 was 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., with the park open from start to finish. On Day 2, we went from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m., but we still had to work around guests the majority of the time.

It’s not just about staying out of the way. It’s also about managing sound when you have rides in the background—or right over your head. On top of that, the park is really big, and we had a lot of company moves. We raced from one setting to the next, grabbing b-roll on the way to use in the ad, and the film’s interstitials.

We did more than 80 setups, which is insane. But we had a great cast and crew. Everyone there was excited about what we were making.

As challenging as the shoot was, it was also an incredible amount of fun. It’s been really gratifying to see the fan response now that Smiley is finally out in the world and inviting people to “Come Out and Play.”