The Peek-a-Bogeyman is one level more harmless than the Harmless Villain. He's (almost always) a cartoon monster who is more of a jerk than "evil." He takes advantage of the frightening image for which other, more industrious members of his kind have labored and uses his existence to frighten people.
"Boo!" Then, he laughs when they run away. This is all he does. Sometimes, it's his designated job. He probably wouldn't know what to do if someone wasn't frightened of him, which is often An Aesop.
Characters should be careful about what genre they are in, because true horror movie ghosts often pretend to be this to lull their so-called "Genre Savvy" prey into a false sense of security. Alternately, all it takes is one good scare to trigger a Fright Deathtrap.
Sometimes overlaps with Things That Go "Bump" in the Night, but not always. Often the foil of the Reluctant Monster. Compare to the Noble Demon, who is a more serious version of this. Shouldn't be confused with the real Bogeyman. A common practice of the Generic Hairy Monster. Not to be confused with the actually scary Peek-a-Boo Corpse. See also Face of a Thug, when a character is (usually unwillingly) frightening-looking but is otherwise non-malicious.
Examples:
- The Hamburglar in the McDonald's commercials once fit the Harmless Villain Trope, but sometime around the mid-80s they made him cuter, funnier, and friendlier, placing him in this Trope. The Goblins (later renamed the Fry Guys) were the same.
- A decidedly adult spin is put on this trope in the XXXenophile story "The Monster Under the Bed".
- Monsters, Inc. 1 is about a society of monsters who do this to gather power from the screams of frightened children.
- The citizens of Halloween Town in The Nightmare Before Christmas scare people for fun; it's a tradition. The scale of meanness in the scaring varies between the citizens from harmless (Jack Skellington) to sadistic (Oogie Boogie).
- This is what Shrek 1 was in the beginning of the film, scaring others as a device to maintain his privacy.
- Stuart, Cyrus, and Judge in The Frighteners.
- This is what the Harvesters in The Deaths of Ian Stone used to be, with a side order of Physical God—Emotion Eaters by nature, they instilled fear of themselves in humanity so they'd always have a ready supply of food. By the film's beginning, they've mostly abandoned this (having discovered the addictiveness of the fear humans feel in the moments before death), but Gray is still at it, keeping his conscience pure.
- Discharge! (gelefant): Gina/Ghost Girl is a Living Ghost who has Soul Power abilities and wears an Ethereal White Dress. She enjoys pulling pranks on or scaring others, although she never goes overboard with it. Case in point: at the beginning of "Haunted Heroine," she scares Jermaine by phasing her hand up through the ground and grabbing his ankle. She laughs afterward.
- Discworld:
- Schleppel the bogeyman in Reaper Man doesn't even do that. Other bogeymen hide under beds or in wardrobes and then leap out to scare people. Schleppel just stays there... at first.
- In Hogfather, we meet the original bogeyman, who apparently used to be legitimately terrifying, but has had his power sapped by old age and younger pretenders sapping the amount of belief available for him to subsist on. As he grew old, he took the job of the Tooth Fairy, collecting children's teeth and keeping them safe so those teeth won't be used by someone trying Sympathetic Magic, which Archancellor Ridcully describes as "Magic so old it's barely magic".
- The bogeymen who are around these days are banished when their prey hides under bedclothes. As Feet of Clay demonstrates, the City Watch have a protocol of dealing with belligerent bogeymen by putting a blanket over the bogeyman's own head, thus giving it a brief existential crisis.
- Trailer Park Boys: The Bottle Kids. Children who randomly show up, throw bottles at people and run off. The other characters treat them as simply a fact of life and just duck, then continue whatever they were doing afterwards.
- Doctor Who: The episode "Space Babies" has a monster that is literally called the Bogeyman, created by the computer of a ship from the babie's actual nose mucus. Despite its terrifying appearance, it's actually completely harmless, having been created specifically to be a scary monster from a storybook and not actually hurt anyone on board.
- Spend too long in the Krypt in Mortal Kombat 9, and the Krypt Monster will appear; he's an ugly looking guy, but all he does is scare the player and run away. He sometimes even leaves a few Koins.
- Super Mario Bros.:
- Luigi's Mansion (Series):
- Luigi's Mansion: The normal species of ghosts that hang from the ceiling. All they do is drop down to scare Luigi, and then vanish (however, there is a subspecies that attacks with bombs). Blue ghosts also act like this; they pop out to scare Luigi, then run.
- Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon: Gold Greenies are like the Blue ghosts in the first game, except the two that come out of the hockey goal in the fourth mansion, which do attack.
- Luigi's Mansion 3 continues the trend with not one, but two Money Spider ghost species — the Gold Goob, and the Crystal Goob. The former, like its aforementioned counterparts, drops money if you chase it down, whereas the latter will drop one of the respective floor's Gems, which are a collectible set of unique pieces.
- Paper Mario 64: The Boos in this game, in contrast to the hostile and dangerous Boos in most other Mario games, are content to harmlessly scare people. The ones Mario encounters in Boo's Mansion will at worst give him a brief Jump Scare or make him solve puzzles to get further up the building. Their leader Lady Bow joins Mario's party to help defeat Bowser, and one of her combat abilities involves weaponizing a Nightmare Face to scare off opponents.
- Luigi's Mansion (Series):
- Specimen 1 from Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion takes this one step farther back than most, being adorable little chibi cardboard cutouts that leap out with an abrupt Jump Scare but otherwise do absolutely nothing. Its only real chance of killing you is by blocking you long enough for another specimen to kill you, but despite this, according to Cat-DOS it actually does have four kills under its belt via inducing heart-attacks. As the game goes on it does become a lot scarier, particularly when dealing with the specimens that are actually a threat, since it can attack at anytime — even during other specimen attacks.
- Tatara Kogasa from Touhou Project is probably the most harmless non-human in the whole franchise. She's a karakasa that eats surprise, and she always try to surprise people. However, she's actually pretty bad at it, and will sulk if she fails. Akyuu even suggested to the townspeople to pretend to be surprised just so they won't feel bad seeing her sulking. Other than harmless surprises, she doesn't actually attack any humans at all.
- The Lurking Tempest
from the Vortex Pinnacle dungeon in World of Warcraft It pretends to be dead when you're facing it, then pops up and flings lightning bolts when you're not.
- Squidge the Bogey from Tales of the Questor. It's implied that his people have an entire culture/economy based around scaring children and extorting food and trinkets out of them.
- SCP-650
of the SCP Foundation. It uses Offscreen Teleportation to teleport behind its victim, then waits for the person to turn around and freak out upon seeing it. And if you've gotten used to that, it'll start getting creative; it's been reported it has been acting innocuously to people that got used to it, and in one instance it popped into a visible corner, looking terrified of a nonexistant something right behind the person it was trying to scare.
- Casper the Friendly Ghost: Other ghosts besides the eponymous ghost in any medium he appears in love scaring people just for the sake of it. In fact, scaring is Serious Business for them.
- The monsters of Aaahh!!! Real Monsters are all about this.
- The Flying Dutchman of SpongeBob SquarePants is sometimes shown as just wanting to scare people. Other times, he's done things like forcing people to be his crew members, eating them, and carrying the dead to Davey Jones' locker.
- Any and all ghosts in Filmation's Ghostbusters dabble into this from time to time, though Prime Evil despises the entertainment value of fear for humans and the ghosts who don't go all the way into outright bullying and intimidation tactics. And depending on how much an episode tries to be kid-friendly, he can forsake scares entirely and get into typical villain world domination stuff including brainwashing, terrorism, attempted mass murder, zombie-making bombs,ghost-making gases, the list goes on...
- In Garfield and Friends in the episode "Ghost Of A Chance", there is a platoon of ghosts whose job is to scare people. McCraven is a harmless ghost and is friendly enough but his rival Diablo is this trope to a T. He does nothing more than scare Garfield, Odie, and Jon, never showing intent to actually harm them. He's even friendly enough to agree to watch TV with Garfield until he's scared off by the program choices Garfield puts on.
- Classic Disney Shorts: The "Lonesome Ghosts" in the short of the same name are actually just wanting to scare someone for fun; apart from that, they seem not to want to cause any harm. They even call Mickey, Donald and Goofy who work as professional ghosthunters just to have someone to scare.
- A Real Life example would be any dressed-up worker at a haunted house, mostly because of the fact that they aren't allowed to touch people, for obvious reasons.

