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A Hellgate is a connection — doorway, portal, interdimensional weak spot, Wormhole, Negative Space Wedgie, whatever — between the normal world and someplace bad. Whether it explicitly links to Hell or just to Another Dimension, the primary plot function of the Hellgate to allow legions of scary, evil weirdness to invade our world.
A Hellgate can be a permanent fixture of the setting, in which case it will function as a Magnetic Plot Device, putting the "adventure" in Adventure Town and providing a new monster for the protagonists to fight every week.
Other times, the Hellgate itself is the driving force of the plot (or maybe just a MacGuffin): the protagonists seek to close the gate, or to prevent it from being opened in the first place, or even to destroy it. This type of Hellgate tends to be more dangerous, and may even cause The End Of The World As We Know It if left unchecked.
Compare with Portal Network.
Examples
Anime
- The tunnel to Makai/the demon world in Yu Yu Hakusho.
- Crops up at one point early on in Bleach. Ichigo purges a Hollow but because his sins before becoming a Hollow were so great he could not go on to Soul Society (which is saying something considering it's inhabited by the likes of Aizen, Zaraki Kenpachi and Kurotsuchi Mayuri) a Hellgate opens up and pulls him in.
- It's implied that the souls that go to Soul Society are good at first, but it's definitely not Heaven and indeed more like a second life. So just because Aizen is bad now doesn't mean he always was.
Comicbooks
- In the DC Universe, Themyscira has a door to the underworld. It's one of the Amazons' chores to guard it. Their rate of success has had its ups and downs.
Fan Fiction
- Armageddon
 does this literally, with portals crossing dimensions are the only way for anyone to move between Heaven, Earth, or Hell. This means that the only way for either side in the massive three way war to attack any of the others is through the portal, but a portal big enough to move an army through is impossible to close. This really fucks the daemons over when the humans capture the Hellgate in Iraq. Smaller portals are commonly used for rescues or surgical strikes.
Film
- In Hellboy, Rasputin teams up with Nazi occultists for Project Ragna Rok, an attempt to open a portal to The Void and summon the Ogdru Jahad to destroy the world. Hellboy is all that comes through before the portal gets destroyed. 60 years later, Rasputin comes back to make Hellboy reopen the portal.
- The penthouse apartment of the Love Interest in Ghostbusters.
- Lucio Fulci did three films that deal with the concept of "The Seven Gates of Hell": City of the Living Dead/The Gates of Hell, The Beyond/Seven Doors of Death, and House By the Cemetery. The first one involves a gateway located in New England town of Dunwich, which resurrects the dead within the town which is opened when an evil priest hangs himself within the confines of a cemetery. The second deals with another of the Seven Gates of Hell, in an abandoned hotel in New Orleans which was opened when a local warlock trying to seal the doorway is killed by a lynch mob of dumb locals, turning their would-be protector into the head zombie in the process. The third involves the home of a mad scientist/ghoul named Doctor Jacob Freudstein as one of the Gates of Hell.
Literature
- The Dark One's prison in Wheel of Time seems to be located around Shayol Ghul. More accurately, it is all over the world (hence the cuellindar seals being found everywhere), but it is weakest around Shayol Ghul, creating the Blight.
- The gate of the old gods in Gil's All Fright Diner.
- In Eve Forward's Villains By Necessity, the goal of the main characters is to open one of these in order to save the world.
- In Discworld, the overuse of sourcery attracts the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions, and eventually tears open a portal to said Dimensions.
Live Action TV
Table Top Games
- In Warhammer 40000, the Eye of Terror is the largest (though there are others, such as the Maelstrom) Warp-realspace overlay. It's a light-years wide Negative Space Wedgie through which The Legions Of Hell periodically attempt to destroy the galaxy.
- And it may be the largest in fiction. Based on the apparant size in the "Galactic Maps" shown in earlier versions of 40k, the Eye of Terror is a few THOUSAND light years wide.
- The entire game of Rifts is built around countless eponymous gates upening up as a response to the world's mana rising after the Third World War, ripping open the fabric of time and space. Not as many open up as frequently as when the whole sequence started, but there are some stable gates - such as the entirety of the St Louis Arch which is a permanent portal to various hell-like dimensions.
Video Games
- The Hellgates in Devil May Cry.
- The Dark Portal in the War Craft series was forcibly bored between Azeroth and Draenor, but since then it proved nigh-impossible to close, and also paved the way for the Burning Legion (and others) to eventually enter Azeroth.
- Apparently, whatever horrors were committed in the temple of the Zakarum under Kurast in Diablo II weakened the fabric of reality enough that it was easier to create a portal into Hell from there. This may have been because Mephisto didn't want to reveal himself to the world yet, though.
- In the Lord of Destruction expansion, the plateus were littered with portals to Hell. These were likely forcibly created during Baal's ascent up the mountain, though, rather than being weak spots that always existed. Although maybe not—Harrogath was always, cosmogically speaking, a very important location.
- In the original Diablo, reality is warped the deeper you go, until you actually enter Hell.
- The video game Hellgate: London is about, well, hellgates in London.
- The gates to Oblivion in, er, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
- Subverted in the Shivering Isles expansion, where a gate opens to said location but nothing comes out of it. The gate's purpose instead is to attract an adventurer capable of assisting the Daedric Prince Sheogorath defend his realm.
- The teleporters from Doom.
- The chaos gate, the final destination of most players in the Roguelike Ancient Domains of Mystery.
- The chaos gate in Megaman Battle Network 5. It's a Bonus Dungeon, but you have the option of opening it. This act floods the Internet with evil and powers up the viruses.
- In a sense, Exor the giant sword in Super Mario RPG.
- The Hall of Transference, which leads into Promyvion in Final Fantasy XI.
- Tartarus in Persona 3 is a borderline example; it's not an actual portal (more of a giant tower), but fulfils all the other traits of the trope by being a spawning and nesting ground for the Shadows.
- The Fatal Frame series is based around ritual sacrifices designed to keep a number of these closed.
- Ninja Gaiden II on the Xbox 360 has a Hellgate at the peak of Mt. Fuji.
- Age Of Mythology grants the Greeks the ability to summon an Underworld Passage from one point of the map to another, averting the trope... but the Titans expansion gives the Atlanteans the power of creating a small Tartarean Gate, allowing dog-like demons to continually respawn until the gate is destroyed.
- The main campaigns of both game and expansion center around attempts to open much larger Tartarean Gates in order to release Kronos and his... ummm... "Kronies".
- And in normal gameplay of the expansion, each civilization can summon a Titan or suitable mythological replacement from such a gate to help crush enemies and so forth. AOM really likes this trope.
- La Pucelle features portals into the Dark World as the randomly generated Bonus Dungeons.
- Arguably the Dimensional Gates in Disgaea. Although most of the gates go to other areas of the Netherworld some do open on Earth.
- Big Whoop from the Monkey Island series.
- An Inversion, sort of, in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. The Ing themselves don't use the portals to Dark Aether, as they can't survive on Aether in their normal forms; they appear as mist that possesses creatures instead. Some of the portals appeared spontaneously, and some were created by the Luminoth so that they (and eventually Samus) could return the favor.
- Mass Effect: The characters are actually pretty Genre Savvy about the mass relays and refuse to open them until both entrances are discovered normally, for fear that something horrible and unknown might be waiting on the other side. They are correct.
- In fact this starts the Frist Contact War, humans were just opening mass relays wendever they found one which brought the tuirian attention
- The portals in HalfLife behave exactly like this, allowing the Combine to come through and enslave Earth.
Webcomics
- A portal to hell briefly opened up in Scary Go Round's Tackleford, and was only shut down by some quick legal beagling on the part of Shelley. At a cost.
- In Sluggy Freelance, an alternative Riff's Dimensional Flux Agitator left a pinhole between the Dimension of Pain and the "Dimension of Lame", eventually allowing the demons from the former to invade the latter. There was also a similar pinhole between the main world and the Dimension of Sham-Pain, but the Dimension of Sham-Pain was such a silly alternative version of the Dimension of Pain that never amounted to anything much, particularly when those demons couldn't enter the pinhole.
- In Torg's comic Gunman Stan Mc Kurt vs. The Gates of the City of the Damned, the apparent antagonist wants to open the titular gates, "the very gates of Hell itself," and Stan Mc Kurt means to stop her. In the end she dies without a chance to explain herself, but those who can read (which does not include Mc Kurt) find out that she only wanted to open the gates because they all are in the City of the Damned at the moment, so it would mean getting out.
Western Animation
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