Hellhound - Television Tropes & Idioms

"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 Baskerville 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:

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, though a few are actually benevolent.
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 worm.
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.
- In some versions it can change shape, but it always keeps its red eyes.
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.

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 Cerburus, 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.
Pratchet 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.
- Grimhounds appear as straight-up villains in The Wee Free Men.
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.
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.
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.
Various types of Hellhounds serve as recurring enemies in the Lone Wolf Gamebooks. 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...
The dogs of Gwyn the Hunter in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain.

Anime

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 a rather disturbing (even by Berserk standards) example of this trope in the form of the Beast. It's a vicious, sadistic pointy-snouted wolf-like creature that seeks to corrupt Guts. The disturbing part is that the Beast exists entirely in Gut's head. This Troper isn't entirely certain if the Beast really is just the embodiment of Guts' rage and hatred or something else...

Film

The Chronicals 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.
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.

Videogames

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.
Cerberus is a summon in Final Fantasy VIII.
Deformed zobmie dogs called cerburus 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 Bowdelrization 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.
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.

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.

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 Fleshound 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.
Magic The Gathering has the Hollowborn Barghest.

Theater

Mephistoles first appears as a black poodle in Faust.

Webcomics

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.
- There's also a bonus page featuring several "Black Dogs of the British Isles," based on actual folklore.

Truth In Television