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"Holy shit," I breathed. "Hellhounds." "Harry," Michael said sternly, "you know I hate it when you swear." "You're right, sorry. Holy shit," I breathed, " heckhounds." — The Dresden Files
The oldest of the domesticated animals and man's constant companion throughout history. Cute, loyal, and steadfast. Except when they, you know, aren't.
Hellhounds have been appearing as long as dogs have been domesticated, perhaps longer, making this one Older Than Dirt. Standard hellhounds are black with glowing red or flaming eyes. They may have two or even three heads. Famous hellhounds are Cerberus and the Hound of the Baskervilles. Fenrir may also fit, and Garm certainly does.
As their name implies, they are generally thought to originate in the underworld, but this has become a relaxed requirement for modern incarnations.
Although their origins are impossibly varied, they can generally be lumped into three categories:
Hunter
Escaped or deliberately released from Hell, these hellhounds exist only to hunt and kill. These are usually "hellhound classic," appearing as black hounds with red eyes. The eponymous hound from The Hound of the Baskervilles is probably the most famous example of this type, although it turned out to be a fake.
Guardian
This version is usually just as dangerous as the Hunter, but it is tasked with guarding a location or person. If they're guarding a person, that person is usually associated with Hell. The most famous guardian hellhound is of course Cerberus. Garm is the same but with a Northern accent ( lots of Hells have a North).
Portent
The sight of one of these black dogs was a foretelling of doom. They might be malevolent or outright dangerous. Myths are split between the sight of the Black Dog being the cause of the misfortune or merely a symptom. The Barghest of Yorkshire may be the best known example, although the Grim from Harry Potter may be replacing it due to Pop Cultural Osmosis.
Classical hellhounds are immune to Kick The Dog (It'll bite your foot off if you try!). May occasionally overlap with Big Badass Wolf, but these are generally more supernatural/evil.
They may be part of The Wild Hunt. Compare to Hellish Horse.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Hellsing has Alucard able to summon a hellhound, explicitly named as The Hound of the Baskervilles.
- There's an Ultimate level Digimon based off Cerberus.
- For the second Monster Of The Week in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, a cute little puppy was transformed into a huge, black, four-eyed hellhound with many bony protrusions.
- In the third season, a mage named Verossa was introduced who has the power to summon packs of ghostly, classic hellhounds for hunting down his targets.
- Berserk has an example of this trope in the form of the Beast of Darkness. It's a vicious, sadistic pointy-snouted wolf-like creature with lighting-bolt shaped eyes that seeks to corrupt Guts. The disturbing part is that the Beast exists entirely in Guts's head. The Beast is the embodiment of Guts' own rage and hatred at the Godhand, the Apostles and especially Griffith after the Eclipse. Among other things, it wants Guts to kill Casca so that he can get back to seeking revenge.
- In Naruto, Pain's Animal Path is fond of summoning a gigantic hellhound with multiple heads that can split into lots of smaller ones.
- One Piece's Thriller Bark arc had a Cerberus-style "Frankensteined" dog (actually two dogs and a fox) seen here
 , but it was actually pretty friendly.
- Asuna and crew in Mahou Sensei Negima found themselves facing a Cerberus guarding the room Negi was held in during the Mahora Festival arc. It was the classic depiction of Cerberus too, complete with three heads and a mane of serpents.
Film
- The Chronicles Of Riddick has alien dogs, named hellhounds, that guard a prison. They look like a cross between a dog and a pangolin.
- The movie Black Dog is about hellhound that will take everything away from greedy truckers.
- In The Omen, Damien is protected by black dogs.
- Although called Terror Dogs, Zuul and Vinzclortho from the first Ghostbusters movie could be considered hellhounds.
- Apparently, the Master's doberman in Manos The Hands Of Fate was meant to be a hellhound, although the cosmology of the Manos cult is a bit vague. Some people even think it was a battleship.
- There's also a representation of Cerberus in Disney's Hercules. This version also appears as a boss battle in both Kingdom Hearts games.
- Hellboy has Sammael, a tentacled, insectoid devil dog. It's also the "Hound of Resurrection": it can immediately recover from any non-fatal injury, and every time it is killed, two more of it are born to take its place.
- Lost Boys calls a vampire's canine daylight guardians the "Hounds of Hell".
- Gmork in the film version of The Neverending Story fits the hunter form of this trope well, as the agent of the Nothing sent to kill Atreyu.
Gamebooks
- Various types of Hellhounds serve as recurring enemies in the Lone Wolf books. In earlier adventures, Lone Wolf has to face the Doomwolves, the (barely) tamed pets/mounts of the goblin-like Giaks. Then he has to face the Akataz, the warhounds of the Drakkarim. Book 18 has as one enemy encounter the Hounds of Vikkak, described as "hellish beasts born of dark sorcery". Finally, Book 19 introduces a mecha version of one, aptly named Mech-Wulf. This Troper wonders if Joe Dever had bad experiences with dogs in his youth...
- And let's not forget about Demon Lord Tagazin, a recurring villain with the appearance of a sabertoothed jackal.
Literature
- In the Heralds of Valdemar series by Mercedes Lackey, this role is filled by the wyrsa, which are a half-viper, half-greyhound.
- In Harry Potter, Fluffy is a three-headed hellhound. It guards something and, like Cerberus, can be put to sleep with music.
- The Grim could also be considered a hellhound.
- The two dogs in R.L. Stine's "The Barking Ghost" (pictured above). The title is somewhat misleading as the dogs are not ghosts; they're really two people whose souls had been traded into the bodies of dogs by a magical cabin in the woods.
- Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles.
- The Wheel Of Time has darkhounds, which are associated with The Wild Hunt.
- Pratchett and Gaiman's novel Good Omens has a hellhound named, of all things, Dog.
- Who quickly mellows out. Having the surprisingly nice Antichrist, Adam, for an owner probably contributes.
- Dog's existence is shaped by Adam's desires. Originally more like what you would expect from a hellhound, he is transformed into a tiny yapping variety of canine, due to Adam's expectations of what his ideal dog would be like. He quickly adjusts, due in no small part to the fact that female dogs don't exist in Hell if you catch my drift.
- Grimhounds appear as straight-up villains in The Wee Free Men. Notably they have orange eyebrows, after several non sequitur references in earlier books about "never trust a dog with orange eyebrows".
- Amusingly, up until that point, Pratchett always insisted he was talking about Rottweilers.
- The Sword Of Truth series has Heart Hounds, which are tan, but otherwise fit the trope to a T.
- Sorrow and Rage, as well as the rest of the black hounds that accompany Alain in Kate Elliot's Crown of Stars series, are hellhounds of the Guardian type. Interestingly, Alain is implied to be a saint or messiah rather than from hell.
- Christopher Moore's novel A Dirty Job has two hellhounds tasked with guarding a little girl because she is Death. Their names: Mohammad and Alvin. They're basically normal dogs, except for being huge, fiercely loyal, and apparently unkillable. And they burp flames when fed with propane tanks!
- In Steven Erikson's Malazan Book Of The Fallen, the Hounds of Shadow are powerful and terrifying supernatural beasts that do the bidding of Shadowthrone, and the Hounds of Darkness are even more powerful and terrifying, but they do no-one's bidding... And there are the T'lan Ai, the primitive undead semi-domesticated dogs of the T'lan Imass.
- HP Lovecraft's The Hound.
- Sauron took the form of a werewolf/hellhound in The Silmarillion.
- All werewolves can probabaly count as this, as they were basically spirits on the same level as Balrogs only in wolf-form. Carcharoth was the greatest of these, and he only became more hellish after ingesting one of the Silmarills, which started burning him from the inside, driving him mad.
- In The Dresden Files novel Grave Peril, Harry and Michael spend a little too long in the Nevernever and end up drawing the attention of the Leanansidhe, Harry's fairy godmother (and no, not the good fairy godmother), and her pack of hellhounds. The origin of the page quote.
- Not only are there hellhounds in the Whateley Universe, but in the novel "There's an Angel in Father John's Basement", the techno-mage Korrupt has figured out how to summon a really nasty mecha variant of his own devise.
- The dogs of Gwyn the Hunter in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain.
- The unnamed dog pack in Riddley Walker, although not actually supernatural, do represent the wholly supernatural dogs Folleree and Folleroo from their equivalent of Punch And Judy shows.
- Mrs. Norris in the Percy Jackson series is definitely a Hell Hound, but she doesn't really fitt the archetypes. The closest fit would be guardian.
- In The Gnome's Engine, a troll makes several references to the troll king's "hounds". When a half-fairy guest of the trolls notices some extremely large, fearsome dogs in the courtyard, she's informed that they're merely the king's dogs: if she met his hounds, she'd know the difference. An aversion? We'll never know...
- Snarleyyow, from "Snarleyyow" by Captain Frederick Marryat is a dog believed by the ship's crew to be straight out of hell. With good reason... Doesn't quite fit the three standard models given at the top of the page though, Snarleyyow is a miserable thing that backs down when faced with any real resistance, only reason it hasn't gone overboard is that it belongs to the captain.
Live Action TV
- In the series Reaper, there is a small dog from Hell named Spike, who can transform into a big, nasty hellhound.
- Supernatural also has invisible hell hounds that work for Lilith to collect contractees. They can only be seen by the people they've come to kill.
- The original Kolchak: The Night Stalker episode "The Devil's Platform" had a Devil worshipper who could turn into a Hell Hound (portrayed by a Rottweiler).
- In Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Tucker Wells unleashes some hell hounds he's trained to attack people in formal wear at the Prom to exact his revenge.
- In Big Wolf On Campus, Tommy befriends an escaped hellhound.
- There's a pretty ridiculous 1978 TV movie out there called Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell. Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
- A "webisode" of Rescue Me features the firemen hunting a mysterious, possibly dangerous animal (one of them thinks it's a chupacabra) that has gotten into their station it turns out to be an Irish Wolfhound. In their defense, they're pretty friggin' huge dogs
- Lost Tapes features one as one of it's monsters.
Myth And Legend
- Cerberus was the guardian of Hades in Greek myth.
- The British Isles have many legends of ghostly hounds, referred to as black dogs. Most of them are portentous, some were actively malevolent and a few are actually benevolent.
- Probably the best known malevolent example is Black Shuck, which according to folklore burst into a church in Blythburgh on 4 August 1577, killing a man and boy and causing the church tower to collapse through the roof. As the dog left, he left scorch marks on the north door which can be seen at the church to this day.
- On the benevolent end of the scale are the Gurt Dog of Somerset, which was said to protect children and lone travellers, and the Friend of the Moore, a rather obscure example from the north-east of England which also aided travellers.
- Garm from Norse mythology is a wolf who guards the gates of Niflheim, which is where a person whose name is literally Hel lives. Her brother, Fenrir, is also a giant wolf.
- Many in the various incarnations of The Wild Hunt
- In Britain, Yeth hounds chase sinners or the unbaptized.
- In Wales, the hellhounds ('Cwn Annwn') accompanying the Wild Hunt were white with red ears.
- Another version gives them mirrors for eyes.
- In Norse mythology, one of the Black Dogs could appear on your hearth. If it did, you'd have to care for it for a year.
- A Barghest is a monstrous black dog with large teeth and claws. It was either a portent of death or it preyed on lone travelers.
- From what this troper has read, the Grimhound (portrayed, typically, as a black dog with fiery eyes, the same as half a dozen other examples of this trope) are both guardian and portent. They're the protectors of the dead...but if you can see one of them, it's because you'll soon be one of those it's guarding.
- The Egyptian jackal god of the dead Anubis can be seen this way. On top of that, there's also his white wolf cousin Wepwawet (a war god associated with Anubis and the dead, making him a Hunter to Anubis' Guardian), and Duamutef, a jackal god assigned to protect the stomach and intestines of the mummified, though his history made him more of a Hunter than a Guardian.
Music
- Robert Johnson sings about the third type in Hellhound On My Trail.
- Black Shuck by The Darkness descibes a hellhound, the Black Shuck of the title, which has the distiction of being one of the best known of the British Black Dogs/Hellhounds.
Tabletop Games
- Early Dungeons And Dragons had several types of hellhounds, including one that could breathe out fire and one as part of The Wild Hunt.
- By extension, many video games based off the series include them.
- Warhammer 40000: Flesh Hounds of Khorne, although they look more like lizard-dog hybrids than the traditional hellhound.
- A Flesh Hound special character Karanak has three heads, and is used by Khorne to hunt down and catch those mortals who earn his ire.
- Just to note, there's also an Imperial Guard unit called the Hellhound, but it's simply a tank with a really big flamethrower. Although any soldier seeing one on the battlefield, and it's not on his side, is usually doomed.
- The new Imperial Guard Codex introduces two variants called the Devil Dog and the Bane Wolf. The Devil Dog has a melta cannon, a melta weapon with AOE. Tanks and Terminators don't stand a chance. The Bane Wolf has a Chemical Cannon that's really short ranged but is AP3, wounds on a 2, and ignores cover saves. All three variants are fast tanks now, meaning that they can move and fire more weapons than normal. The rightly feared Bane Wolf with multi-melta variant can momve 12 inches and fire both weapons, meaning most heavy infantry are absolutely screwed and to top it off, this variant is really hard to kill in assault because it moved fast.
- Magic The Gathering has the Hollowborn Barghest.
- Yu Gi Oh has Messenger From the Underworld, with bonus points for being a Tuner Monster that has a ridiculously high level (7), admittedly one that can be weakened to drop the level to something usable (5).
- There's also Twin-Headed Wolf, based on Cerberus (or, more correctly, Orthrus, Cerberus' two-headed brother), and, of course, several cards based on the mother of all hellhounds, Anubis.
- Munchkin Bites has a monster called the Heck Hound.
- Shadowrun had several Awakened (magical) canine monsters.
- The Barghest had a protruding spine on its back, glowing red eyes and glowing teeth. It could cause fear and had a paralyzing howl.
- The Hellhound could breathe out fire and was immune to fire.
- The Gabriel Hound could freeze you in place and was a terror in combat.
Theater
- Mephistopheles first appears as a black poodle in Faust.
Video Games
- Final Fantasy IX has an enemy that is a two jawed dog named Cerberus.
- Pokemon has Houndour and Houndoom as the hunter/guardian types, and Absol based on the Barghest as the portent type.
- Fittingly enough, Houndour and Houndoom are Fire/Dark types.
- Cerberus is a summon in Final Fantasy VIII.
- Deformed zombie dogs called Cerberus appear in Resident Evil.
- The boss Fenris in World Of Warcraft is a hellish giant wolf.
- There are also felhunters and a few other types of hound-like demons, some of which come with two heads.
- Harry Potter also had the Gytrash, a giant ghostly dog, which appeared in some of the games.
- It's based on a Lincolnshire myth, although the original gytrash was sometimes a horse or a crane as well.
- Several games in the Zork series, notably Wishbringer and Return To Zork, directly connect hellhounds and poodles. This is probably a Shout Out to Faust (see below).
- "Heck Hounds" in Secret of Mana were a Bowdlerization of hell hounds.
- Barghests are an enemy in the Wild ARMs series.
- In the MMO Runescape, hellhounds are a fairly strong standard monster that look like giant red dogs. There's also a quest boss called a skeletal hellhound, which is both Exactly What It Says On The Tin and, strangely, weaker then a normal hellhound.
- Without muscles and skin, you'd be weaker too!
- The second Kingdom Hearts game features adorable Heartless versions of hellhounds inhabiting the underworld, in addition to the aforementioned boss monster, Cerberus.
- The first boss in Devil May Cry 3 is Cerberus, here portrayed as being frozen in ice and chained in front of the door to Temen-Ni-Gru. You have to shoot the ice off before you can effectively hurt him, and he can refreeze himself at will. As he loses health, two of his heads get blown off, and halfway down his health bar he Turns Red and snaps some of his chains.
- A number of these appear in Shadow Hearts; perhaps the most notable are the Mailmen, demons that appear as hounds with human arms jutting from their mouths. In the first game, when backed into a corner, the mayor of Bistriz turns himself into a hideous, giant dog made of flayed flesh, named Tindalos.
- Cerberus is very popular. In the first Parasite Eve, a police dog transforms into a giant three-headed monster.
- World Of Warcraft features various various types of demonic dogs used as hunting and guard dogs by various evil factions(iron dwarves and nexus sorcerers even have a bright blue variety). Most have a special attack against casters. In contrast, the actual Fellhounds look like zerglings. Very late into the game, the player will encounter the giant, two headed Core Hounds, who look and function like a pair of rhinos taped together side by side instead of actual dogs.
- The core hounds (only one of which looks like an actual dog) became tamable as exotic Hunter pets with "Wrath of the Lich King."
- NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams' Cerberus.
- Most Silent Hill games include creepy dog monsters as normal enemies.
- The first boss in Lost Kingdoms 2 is a monster called Hell Hound, the best Jump card. There's also the monster Cerberus. It too is a Jump card, but not as good.
- The first game has the Demon Hound card, based on the Cu Sėth, a black dog that haunts the Scottish Highlands.
- Somehow, Quest 64 gets away with this one. Naturally, it's a one-headed wolf that breathes fire.
- Both episodes of Penumbra have evil dogs akin to the ones in Resident Evil and Silent Hill. They feature more prominently in Overture.
- Heroes Of Might And Magic III has Hell Hounds and Cerberi in the Inferno castle.
- Call Of Duty World at War has literally named Hell Hounds in the later Nazi Zombies maps, which charge at the player on fire and sometimes explode. All prefaced with a creepy voice saying 'Fetch me their souls!' and the map getting foggy.
- In Dungeon Keeper, you could get the Hellhound minion, a two-headed firebreathing monstrosity, that would... water the corpses of you enemies, or just the floors for lack of corpses. Poor pup kept running off and getting killed though.
Web Comics
- In Gunnerkrigg Court, one of the Guides is the Moddey Dhoo, a giant black dog with fiery eyes. Like all the Guides, he's nicer than he looks.
- Sivine Blades subverts it by having the "wild" hellhounds relatively harmless. However, when one is captured and used as a guard dog...
- Bun-bun rides one during his assault on Thanksgiving castle as part of the Holiday Wars arc.
Web Original
- AH Dot Com The Series has Sudanases Hunting Dogs (based on a forum running joke) which shoot clouds of bees from their mouth when they bark. As a Shout Out to Discworld's Grimhounds, they have orange eyebrows.
Western Animation
Real Life
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