In 2024 I designed a haunted house with my childhood best friend.

Why? Because I love theme parks. I love spooky mazes. I love Halloween. And because I was in a creative rut.

Picture it! Early 2024! Hollywood was only beginning to crumble! “Survive til ‘25!” was the motto around town, and the last one I heard before most friends in the industry simply viewed the lack of jobs as a new normal.

After the pandemic, corporate consolidation, and (necessary) strikes in Hollywood - the vibes weren’t great. And while the TV & movie landscape felt bleak, my creativity wandered in another direction…

I was galvanized when I discovered Haunt Comp, the friendly haunted house competition that challenges self-selected teams of enthusiasts and industry hopefuls to design the best scary walkthrough attraction.

All judged by industry professionals from places like Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights and (my personal fave) Knott’s Scary Farm.

Over the years, I’ve gone from scaredy-cat to Halloween haunt superfan. Walking through these mazes combines my love of old-school Disneyland and carnival dark rides with the handmade artistry of experiential storytelling.

It’s ephemeral, it’s personal and it’s fun. Simply put, haunts rule.

First thing I did was recruit my childhood best friend and fellow haunt fan, Harry Chaskin. He works in stop-motion and live action horror, was similarly disillusioned by the state of the entertainment industry, and more than down.

Harry and I have made things together since we were kids. Sketches, comics, TV shows, Batman commercials. We agreed to treat this competition like the adult version of the stuff we used to make in his family’s garage in middle school. The rule was FUN. If it ever stopped being fun, we’d stop.

Luckily, we were selected to enter 2024’s Haunt Comp. The other teams mostly seemed like home haunters and recent college grads who wanted to become professionals in the attractions industry. Like the 24 hour film fests I entered in college, teams got one-word maze suggestions to choose from…

We chose INK. Lots of possibility there! After a brainstorm, our top contender for a maze was something near and dear to our hearts.

A self-reflexive haunt that paired our love and knowledge of old-school animation with a friendly, warped nod to Disney itself. We called it…

TOONY TERROR

A sickeningly cheerful animation studio tour turns terrifying as guests must survive the hilariously homicidal antics of killer cartoons that have mysteriously come to life!

Welcome to Winkwell Studios

Where cartoons are made real… a little too real.

Though he’s been dead for years, reclusive studio founder Wilton Wink strove to achieve immortality through his art. The studio’s heyday is long gone, but rumor has it Wilt ominously teased “a big surprise” for Winkwell’s 100th Anniversary.

As VIP guests on a special after hours centennial tour, you’ll experience that surprise firsthand and see how cartoons are brought to life… until they try to put you to death! 

As the tour derails and the studio staff is maniacally mutilated, you must scramble to escape the murderous antics of Wilt’s terrifying toons! If you can survive getting crushed by falling anvils or blown to smithereens by TNT, you just might last long enough to discover Wilt’s terrible secret…

Queue the Mayhem

Bloody cartoon footprints on the ground welcome us to an exterior queue leading to the haunt facade, a spooky version of Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway. A banner celebrating 100 Years of Winkwell Studios drapes over the art deco building.

A waving cartoon walrus mascot front and center.

As we wind through the line we’ll catch glimpses of the studio’s history and cartoons throughout the decades, from movie posters to oversized props. But there are hints that something is going wrong.

A giant axe prop is missing. Shredded electrical wires spark. Shadow gags through frosted studio windows indicate violent mayhem afoot. A Steamboat Willie-like cartoon loops with the character occasionally breaking the Fourth Wall to simply stare back… watching us.

But there’s no turning back now, because we’ve made it to the rusted gates of the studio entrance, beckoned by the screams inside…

Winkwell Studios Lobby & Zoetrope Room

As the tour begins, an annoyingly chipper Winkwell Tour Guide ushers us into a round art deco room. They direct our attention to an introductory video that projects in the round and tells the story of Wilton Wink and his famous cartoon mascot, Wally Walrus.

Charming zoetrope images of Wally skipping transition from flipbook stills to fluid animation as cheerful old-timey whistlin’ music plays. Our tour guide explains, “This is how cartoons come to life!” 

Without warning, the lights flicker and the zoetrope accelerates into a disorienting whirlwind. Wally’s skip transforms into a scary knife-wielding chase underscored by warped music. The lights momentarily black out to the sound of film UNSPOOLING as the tour guide SCREAMS in the darkness. 

When the lights buzz back on, Wally has escaped the screen, now a human actor stabbing the tour guide. Projected blood spatters on the walls and the whole room turns RED as the dying tour guide urges guests to “GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN!”

Blue Sky Bloodbath & Microphone Murders

As we hurry out the lobby, tinny audio narration crackles from speakers, guiding us on the tour of our nightmares. “Welcome to the Blue Skies room, where ideas emerge from deep within the writer’s brain!”

A writer slumps over a typewriter with pages strewn about that read “KILL KILL KILL” and “DRAIN MORE BLOOD, MAKE MORE TOONS!” A lightbulb is jammed into their open skull... but as we inch past the desk, the writer lurches upward SCREAMING as the bulb lights up!

We rush out and into the Recording Booth, where a Voice Actor is being strangled by microphone wires behind glass. They suddenly lunge forward and BANG their fist against the glass and shout “HELP US!”

As we jump back and exit, the goofy voice of Wally Walrus can be heard with some notes, “Gawrsh, that one peaked. Let’s get another take!”

Pencils Department

We enter a dimly lit warehouse-style room lined with rows of blood-spattered drafting tables illuminated by flickering lamps.

Tour audio continues, tinny and distorted, as it welcomes us to the Pencils Department, where sketches become reality! Several dead animators lay slumped against their workstations. One corpse is riddled with fountain pens. Another is impaled on a t-square ruler. 

As we’re forced to weave our way through the rows to the exit, we pass a spotlit drafting table covered in inky claw marks. A sinister giggle and unsettling stretching sound can be heard as a 4-fingered cartoon hand pushes through the animation paper and grasps at us!

But without warning, a human actor whirls around, pencils jammed through their eyes, SCREAMING “They’re alive!”

Foley, Fandom and Food

The next three rooms of the tour transition us from cartoon production to Research & Development to the employee cafeteria.

In the Foley Room, audio narration explains this is where the sound effects are made! We crunch across uneven floors full of leaves and gravel as dying foley artists jolt us with shaker cans and big wobbly pieces of sheet metal that create disorienting bursts of fake thunder.

A looping clip of a cartoon horse clops on a screen, while a scare actor dressed as the same horse jumps out using the human skull of a foley artist to create the clopping sounds like a twisted version of the coconut clops from Monty Python & The Holy Grail.

In the next room, we inch past R&D, full of blood-spattered plushies and prototypes for Wally Walrus theme park rides. A marketing deptartment lead is electrocuted in a Dumbo-esque ride vehicle.

From there we enter the employee cafeteria where the narration explains with a chuckle that we’re transitioning from where the sausage is made to where the sausage is eaten!

Wally Walrus and pals carve up human employees behind counters with cartoonishly large butcher knives and drink their blood with oversized straws jammed in their necks. One of them shouts, “Needs more salt!”

Screening Screaming Room

Having narrowly escaped being eaten alive, we wind our way through the Studio Screening Room, past rows of theater seats. But they’ve been partially crushed by anvils and safes as a Droopy-esque cartoon dog holds a tiny umbrella above their head and simply mutters: “It’s really coming down today.” Distracted by the dog, we’re jump scared as a fallen piano flings open to reveal a crushed victim SCREAMING!

All the while, the movie screen loops choppy footage of Wilton Wink documenting experiments where he extracts his own blood. In the foreground, a shadow gag of cartoon characters bashing a projectionist with film reels plays out.

Unfortunately for us, the tour’s normal exit is blocked by a fallen anvil, so we’re diverted from the path and through a Looney Tunes / Roger Rabbit-esque cartoon character shaped hole in the wall into…

Cold Storage

Now that we’re off the beaten path, the audio narration disappears. We walk through a large rusted freezer door labeled COLD STORAGE.

The room is freezing and filled with fog. Shelves of haphazardly stacked film reels line the walls. The fog dissipates as we enter to reveal a path over metal grates flanked by 13 tubes containing cryogenically frozen heads!

A frosty plaque reads WILT’S 13 OLD MEN: ANIMATORS, GENIUSES, IMMORTALS. As we wind past the heads, pipes RATTLE and compressed air unpredictably BLASTS guests.

Two of the heads are human actors that lurch to life, eyes bulging and screaming “TIME TO WAKE UP!” and “IMMORTALITY AWAITS!”

Toon Transformation Factory

Beyond the chilly chambers of Cold Storage we find ourselves stepping across the buzzing, vibrating metal floor of a horrific cartoon factory!

It reveals the truth of how these killer cartoons are brought to life. Dummy bodies are strapped to gurneys with tubes pumping blood from their veins and draining straight into huge inkwells… inkwells connected to a monstrous machine labeled CARTOON-O-MATIC!

A machine that brings Wilt’s famed characters to life through our DEATH! Because if Wilt and his 13 Old Men couldn’t live forever in human form, maybe they could live on as his characters… but now they’ve got a murderous mind of their own and a need for blood.

We’re ushered to step into the machine by a cartoony mad scientist with a big syringe cackling, “You’re next!”

Scream, Darn Ya, Scream!

The grand finale finds us dead… our human forms long gone, as we emerge into a bright and cartoony hell that’s one part the end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and two parts the end of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride!

A warped, happy-go-lucky song plays as all the cartoons we’ve met so far puppeteer human corpses and sing along.

We’re distracted by their antics as we exit the maze - caught off guard when the final gigantic puppet swipes at us with a GIGGLY ROAR. It’s Wilton Wink himself, mutated and freakishly fused with Wally Walrus.

Our screams echo and beckon new victims inside, and thus concludes our tour of Winkwell Studios, where cartoons are made real… too real.

And there you have it! That’s the haunt Harry and I dreamt up in 2024!

We submitted a truncated version to the Rough Draft phase of Haunt Comp, intending to continue… but life caught up, and the prospect of creating schematics, elevations, and all the really hard stuff that goes into making a haunt seemed less fun to juggle with the mundane perils of adulthood.

So we voluntarily bowed out of Haunt Comp, and this maze sat in a digital folder. Until now! When two years later, Knott’s Scary Farm announced a similar idea about killer cartoons coming this Halloween season…

To be honest, watching the maze announcement was bittersweet. On the one hand, it’s always a bummer to see somebody else make your idea first. But it also felt nice that an idea very similar to our own was conceptually good enough to show up at my #1 fave theme park Halloween event.

And… unless we somehow broke into the themed entertainment industry as a midlife pivot, this maze wasn’t ever gonna realistically happen anyway.

Which is why I’m sharing it now.

If you love an idea enough, it deserves an audience. Harry and I loved this one. Like a pilot you don’t sell that still gets a staged reading, there’s something artistically nourishing about simply putting it out there.

And while nobody will ever experience Toony Terror the way it’s intended to be experienced (with lots of fog and at least one obligatory stinky room), I’m excited it’s been released from its Google Drive folder prison.

But if you liked what you read above - we truthfully lifted most of Wilt’s lore and endgame straight out of Harry’s excellent graphic novel The Happiest Place! Which you should check out! It’s a theme park noir with some horror trappings and the lore makes way more sense in his book than our maze.

Hell, maybe one day Harry and I will actually build our own haunt?! HIRE US.

But for now, I’m just pumped to walk through the Knott’s version in October and see how they approach the same idea from a different angle.