Creepy Mascot Suit

There's something about pink rabbits that makes you run really fast.

"Cutesy, huggable mascots are a shockingly new corporate strategy. Up until recently, it was perfectly acceptable to toss a wretched byproduct of Satan's sperm bank right in the paying customer's face, watch them scream and cry in a puddle of their own fear-vomit, and then calmly ask, 'Will that be cash or credit?'"

— Cracked, 7 Famous Mascots (Who Once Looked Scary As Hell)

A person wearing a mascot suit, especially if it's of an animal/furry, is almost always the Mascot Villain, or are just portrayed as being creepy. If they are antagonistic, they're almost always portrayed as a Stalker without a Crush. They're usually supernatural to an extent as well, appearing in places where they shouldn't be in or possessed by a spiritual being with Ghostly Goals.

The existence of this trope can largely be explained by the Uncanny Valley. These mascots can look kind of like cartoon animals, but not enough to appear friendly. There's also the fact that mascots are the size of adult humans, while many cartoon animals are smaller than humans, which can make mascots Accidental Nightmare Fuel to kids. The fact that mascot suit heads usually are designed to always look happy can tie into this, as it invokes Dissonant Serenity and the "empty" and "unstable" varieties of the Stepford Smiler trope.

If the mascot performer is not evil, but kids are scared of them anyway, this can overlap with Dreaded Kids' Party Entertainer Job.

Compare to Hostile Animatronics, Malevolent Masked Men, Monster Clown and Mascot Horror. See also Creepy Old-Fashioned Diving Suit, for another outfit considered scary due to the way it hides its wearer's face, and Uncanny Valley. Contrast Goofy Suit, Loser Team Mascot, and Bad Job, Worse Uniform, although they could overlap with this trope.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Franken Fran:
  • One issue had a virus that turned people into zombies, pretty standard, right? Well, what wasn't was that their bodies transformed into mascot costumes.
  • One pedophile is punished by being turned into a living mascot suit, condemned to be surrounded by children but unable to act on his urges.
• Gleipnir plays this to the hilt. The protagonist transforms into a patchwork cartoon dog mascot costume, one which happens to be organic and hollow on the inside. Very much a Creepy Good example.

Comic Books

• The bread and butter of Plush. The series is about a Cannibal Clan of fursuit-wearers, all of whom except one's are modeled after animals. These include a goat, unicorn, and cat, and few of them go more than a single issue without blood splattering over them.

Fan Works

• Zipper T. Bunny from the Animal Crossing games is pretty clearly someone in a bunny suit. However, many fans find his unmoving face and cheerful behavior unsettling, and as a result, most fanart and other fan works depict him as terrifying. He's often compared to genuinely evil costumed characters like Glitchtrap as well.
• The Discworld as re-envisaged by A.A. Pessimal builds on the idea of the brassica-themed fun park of Cabbage World. In canon, the mascot Billy Brassica is specifically described as a Clown. Given the sinister and frightening world of Discworld clowns, Pessimal theorised that this is a sub-specialty of the Fools' Guild, whose full title is something like The Guild of Fools, Jesters, Mime Artists, Minstrels, Troubadors, Stage Conjurors, and People Who Wear Those Bloody Silly Mascot Costumes At Theme Parks And Major Sporting Events.

Literature

• Very briefly invoked in Animorphs, when Visser Three decapitates a mascot. The guy in the mascot suit pokes his head out, causing the Visser to be audibly unnerved at the sight.
• The Discworld has the Sto Plains settlement of Big Cabbage, where the sole and only industry is the agrobusiness of growing cabbages. It has a dedicated theme park, Cabbage World, where the host is Billy Brassica - who wears the theme park costume of a humanoid cauliflower with an unfeasibly massive head. His arch-enemy at Cabbage World is Micky Maggot, another poor soul who has to wear the caterpillar costume. Small children have been known to run away screaming.
• The Kill River 80's slasher trilogy features a big, hulking killer who stalks and kills people in a water park, always wearing a rubber mask of the water park's grinning boat captain mascot called Kaptain Smiley. The mascot's drawings around the camp are done in an antiquated style that makes the character look creepy and unnerving rather than cute, with vacant eyes and an overly large grin, and the mask the killer wears captures all that creepiness, especially whenever it gets wet and sags.

Live-Action TV

• In Ash vs. Evil Dead, Cougie is the high school mascot in Ash's home town. We first see the student wearing the suit, but the suit gets possessed by evil while he's wearing it. The introduction of Cougie possessed by evil is extremely creepy, with ominous music playing as he breathes heavily and stares at Brandy and her friend. Blood starts to pour out of the suit's eyes and more flows from the walls as the music intensifies and the lights dim. Then he disappears and the lights turn back on. Cougie then stalks Brandy in the school, becoming less mascot-like and more terrifying by the minute.
• Only Murders in the Building: Played for Laughs, and yet also Played for Drama. In one episode, Charles is haunted by visions of people in Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig costumes. He treats them like minor annoyances. However, he later reveals why these visions exist to the audience. He took his ex-wife (then wife) and daughter on a family cruise, but his wife broke up with him and left, taking the daughter with her, when the ship was docked midway through the cruise. Charles had already hired the costumed performers for a party for his daughter. They held the party anyway, even though Charles was alone. He still remembers the mascots dancing around him.
• The Haunting Hour: Big Yellow from the episode "Mascot", serves as the mascot of a local school and it's basketball team, even though the mascot, simply a large, yellow, indeterminate... thing, seems to have no connecting theme to the school or anything else, and is simply kept around out of tradition. When Willie and Drake, who hate the mascot, begin pushing to have it replaced, they notice that no one seems to actually know who plays the mascot... because Big Yellow isn't actually a kid in a costume, it's a real, living creature that happens to look like a mascot costume, and is willing to kill to keep it's position.

Video Games

• Dead Rising 2: Brent Ernst, also known as Slappy, is a psychopath working in a children's clothing store as a mascot. He wears a huge bobblehead mask with an eerie smile, has a child-like maturity, wields a pair of flamethrowers, and he attacks Chuck under the belief that he started the zombie outbreak and killed his girlfriend. In battle, he also calls himself the "Toy store mascot from hell".
  Slappy: "The public always underestimates mascots!"
• Duck Season: The Dog is the Mascot Villain of the video game, who hunts down the protagonist. His costume, as his name implies, is of an anthropomorphic dog. He's somehow able to transfer himself from the Duck Season video game to the real world- which he uses to murder people.
• Fallout 4: Bosco is the Axe-Crazy leader of a raider gang who wears a unique piece of headgear called the Mascot Head, a damaged head from a bear mascot suit. According to his backstory, he was bitten by a wild dog and infected with rabies, causing him to sometimes have hallucinations of a terrifying beast and go on killing sprees against his own men. They attempted to placate him by presenting him with the mascot head and convinced him the beast was dead, and he took to wearing it as a trophy.
• Five Nights at Freddy's: Add to the entire series throughout. Although some of the actual suits themselves aren't creepy (such as the first ones), many of them attempt to play up this trope (although usually unintentionally) as their suits have Withered away, or are just... failing to look cute. This is intentionally played straight in Five Nights At Freddys VR Help Wanted and in Fazbear's Fright, though, in which they were made scary in order to attract people. As well as in the books, in which they're given the scary designs in order to instill fear into victims.
• Going Under: The Joblin Promoters wear mascot heads and attack with T-shirts fired from T-shirt Cannons.
• Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne: Vinnie Gognitti is trapped in a Captain Baseball Bat Boy suit (from the game's In-Universe comic strip franchise). While the guy is quite the wimp and an ally of circumstance of Max, the suit is trapped with a bomb inside, which will explode should he remove it.
• Silent Hill 3 introduced Robbie the Rabbit to the franchise. He went to make several cameos both inside and outside the series. He's one of the mascots ^note the other ones are Cathy the Cat, Dawn the Duck and Huey the Horse. None of them actually appear in the series, though. of the Lakeside Amusement Park and resembles a fairly normal humanoid pink rabbit... except for the little detail that both his face and clothes are bloodstained. Several Robbies can be found slumped in various areas of the park as if "dead" but no one knows if they really are. A single Robbie can be seen in Silent Hill 4: The Room if you peek through the hole in the wall into Eileen's apartment, sitting innocuously on the bed if she is home and staring at you with a bloodied face if she isn't, and when you actually go into her apartment in the Otherworld much later it is nowhere to be seen...
• The Park: Chad the Chipmunk serves as one of the most infamous horror stories surrounding Atlantic Island Park: originally a local drunk by the name of Steve Gardner, after taking the role of park mascot, he grew progressively more obsessed with his job until he refused to remove the costume at all - eventually murdering a group of teenagers with an ice pick. As such, whenever Chad appears in the game - blood-splattered mascot costume and all - it's a sure sign that something's about to go horribly wrong. Ironically, he's not even the Big Bad despite his prominence in the games advertising; the real villain is Nathaniel Winter, the owner of the park and the man responsible for Steve's insanity.

Web Animation

• Helluva Boss: In "Loo Loo Land", it's shown that Moxxie has a fear of theme park mascots. He even threatens Loo Loo (the mascot of the titular Amusement Park of Doom) and accuses him of being a pervert under that suit, to which Loo Loo sighs and begrudgingly admits is true.
• Zero Punctuation: In the Epic Mickey episode, Yahtzee states that he used to have a crippling phobia of mascots, which he hadn't gotten over by the time his family went to Disney Land one summer for vacation. Meeting characters was bad enough, but he nearly had a meltdown come the parade (and goes into a post-traumatic flashback to it on-camera).

Web Original

• A threatening and possibly living rather than occupied Mickey suit menaces the narrator at the climax of Abandoned by Disney.
• Cracked: 7 Famous Mascots (Who Once Looked Scary As Hell) discusses corporate mascots (most of which are costumes, though some are illustrations) that used to have unintentionally terrifying designs. The article takes every opportunity to describe these old mascots as abominations of nature that feed on the fear of children.

Western Animation

• Animaniacs: Played for Laughs with Baloney the Dinosaur. He's really just a childish and stupid parody of Barney the Dinosaur (a popular children's character portrayed by a man in a costume), but the Warners are terrified of him partially because they find his saccharine nature annoying, and partially because Baloney is an Implacable Man to the Amusing Injuries that the Warners give him. Strangely, it's hard to tell whether Baloney is an actual dinosaur or a person in a costume. He does have seams indicating that he's a costume, but his face and mouth move like that of a living thing, and there's no indication of a human actor inside the costume. Also, at the beginning of Baloney's show, he magically transforms from a stuffed animal, but there's no indication that this is just an in-universe special effect. So, for all we know, Baloney could be a living, empty mascot costume.
• Arthur: In the episode "Muffy's House Guests," Muffy has peregrine falcons nesting near her house and has to get rid of them. She reveals that she is afraid of the birds because she once had a birthday party at a goose-themed restaurant and was scared by the creepy bird mascot suits.
• Bob's Burgers: The episode "Bed & Breakfast" reveals that Teddy is unperturbed by everything around him, except for mascots with their unblinking, staring eyes. This stems from Teddy watching his wife engage in sex with a guy in a seal mascot costume and being disturbed by the fact the seal was looking at him throughout.
• Clone High: Invoked by the Heebie Jeebie in "Anxious Times at Clone High," a deliberately creepy and monstrous "mental health mascot" who actually drives up the students' stress and eventually starts attacking and abducting them as part of Candide’s plan.
• Dead End: Paranormal Park: In the second episode, Pugsley accidentally uses his newfound powers to bring some old mascot costumes to life, who all lurch after people while saying "Meat", scaring the park's staff and visitors. This is then subverted when it turns out the living costumes meant no harm; they simply wanted to meet and greet people, and happily allow themselves to be returned to normal and washed once that has been fulfilled.
• DuckTales (2017):
  • In the episode A Nightmare on Killmotor Hill, the Dewey Mascot looks creepily at Lena. It later starts acting weird in a distorted hallway where it opens its mouth to reveal Magica De Spell.
  • In the episode "Daytrip of Doom", the Beagle Boys steal a mascot costume so they can sneak into Funzo's Fun Zone and kidnap the triplets and Webby. The real owner of the suit is later revealed to be evil in his own right.
• Gravity Falls: Less suit and more a mascot attraction. In "The Love God", Stan tries to attract customers with a hot air balloon of his face with a sign reading "I Heart Kids". However, it ends up shoddily made, looking like something that wouldn't be out of place from Frankenstein's lab. Not helped that it gets set on fire during the episode with the "h" and "r" on the sign burned off, now reading "I Eat Kids".
• The Mask: The Mask has a wooden mask that contains Loki, the Trickster God's spirit. When Pretorius, the main Big Bad wears The Mask, he turns into a Giant Spider that looks like a mascot suit, but isn't - it's just Pretorius' cyborg head with the mask on.
• In the episode "Frybo" from Steven Universe Steven uses a gem shard to give sentience to Frybo, the mascot from Beach Citywalk Fries. This backfires when the suit takes a command from Peedee to "make people eat fries" in a literal and violent way.
• The Venture Bros.: Scare Bear wears a very creepy-looking bear mascot outfit. Given that he also is constantly holding a big knife, is covered in dried blood, and only communicates in husky breathes, this is arguably the least unsettling thing about him.

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