Hell on Earth

The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world — he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.

But woe to the earth and the sea, for the Devil has come down to you with great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!

— Revelation 12:9-12, New Revised Standard Version

A subtrope of The End of the World as We Know It, Hell On Earth is what happens when The Legions of Hell decide to invade our world.

Maybe some ancient ritual went horribly wrong (or horribly right, or even Just as Planned) and opened a Hellgate, maybe the border between our world and Hell got torn asunder, or maybe our heroes unleashed it themselves by mistake. What the demons want mainly depends on the type of story and the type of demons involved. Whether they want to enslave us, annihilate us, eat us or worse, expect things to get a whole lot worse for anyone who isn't a demon.

As an End of the World scenario, most of the time when this shows up in media, it's an Evil Plan that has to be stopped lest all be lost, and usually does get stopped Just in Time. In that case it is a specific supernatural case of the villains having the Dystopia Justifies the Means as their motivation. But in some stories and series, the end has already happened, or happens in story, and now the heroes have to survive and hopefully find a way to either kill the demons or send them back where they came from and make sure that this doesn't happen again.

See Hell Invades Heaven for the one thing worse than this. Not to be confused with Mordor, which is usually just metaphorically Hell on Earth, or Physical Hell, where Hell is literally located on Earth.

For many of these examples, unmarked spoilers ahead.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• The Millennium Falcon arc of the Berserk manga has this happening due to Griffith/Femto redirecting the Skull Knight's dimension-warping attack into Shiva, the Eldritch Abomination form of Emperor Ganishka, and using its power to fuse the planes of existence together with the mortal world. At the same time, this also created a Shining City that seems more like heaven on earth, though Rickert finds there are darker aspects of it hidden away.
• In Chainsaw Man this is the goal of the Greater-Scope Villain, and it's already happening on a smaller scale. Because Our Demons Are Different, they all have Resurrective Immortality and any Devil that dies in Hell will respawn on Earth and vice-versa.
• Devilman ends this way. The human race is completely annihilated, down to the hero's love interest, her little brother, and the hero himself.
• In The World God Only Knows, the ultimate goal of the New Hell terrorist organization Vintage is to restore the Weiss (Old Devils) to power and create a new Hell on Earth as the war which resulted in the sealing of the Weiss rendered Old Hell an uninhabitable wasteland.

Comic Books

• Angel: Inverted: Los Angeles was dragged into Hell instead of vice-versa. Nevertheless, the effect is the same for those trapped there.
• In Avengers vs. X-Men, Magik brings a portion of Limbo to Earth and uses it as a prison for the captured Avengers.
• This is the backstory of Battle Pope.
• Black Moon Chronicles: Haazheel's and his father Lucifer's plan is to destroy the Empire of Lhynn and turn it into a demon-worshipping theocracy so that God will leave the Earth in disgust. Then the true invasion through the Hellgate can commence, as The Legions of Hell destroy all of humanity to turn the Earth into a new Hell.
• Hellboy will potentially cause and/or prevent this. Indeed, the second cycle of B.P.R.D. comics is even entitled Hell on Earth.
• This is the plot of the Inferno (1988) storyline in Marvel, with all New York-based superheroes wrapped up in the madness (though the main storyline happens in the X-Men titles).
  • Though, specifically, it wasn't actually Hell, it was an invasion of demons from the realm of Limbo. In Marvel, there are numerous different types of demons, and Hell (which is itself split into numerous "Splinter Realms") is only home to certain kinds of them. The ones from Limbo are a different batch, though all demons are evil so this was still a pretty bad thing to happen.
  • In homage to this, Secret Warps, where even the crossovers are mashed-up versions of what's come before, has it happen to the merged universe's New York.
• An issue of JLA had an interesting variation — a gang of renegade angels (not strictly demons, but they were rebelling against God, so make of that what you will) were planning on destroying humanity by bringing heaven to earth. If you're wondering how that would work, it's explained that simply seeing things from heaven in all their glory would be enough to kill mortal men instantly.
• Past the Prehistoric Avengers victory over a diseased Celestial in 2018's The Avengers, Mephisto had been steadily expanding his influence throughout the world. Khonshu tried to prevent this by taking most of the powers of the Prehistoric Avengers and killing the many alternate versions of Mephisto who came to assassinate him. After Khonshu is defeated and banished, a horrified Tony Stark sees the dead Mephistos and realize it's only the beginning and that Hell isn't coming for just the Earth, they are going for the entire universe.
• In the Venom storyline Circle of Four, Blackheart unleashes hell on Los Angeles and attempts to spread it across the world.
• While the Avengers have Mephisto to deal with, the X-Men have to deal with the consequences of a demonic invasion that took place thousands of years ago in X of Swords. The demon forces of Amenth have an alliance with the powerful mutants of Arakko and have already conquered the Otherworld kingdom of Draydor and have their sights on Earth.

Films — Animated

• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney): When Judge Claude Frollo learns Esmeralda has escaped Notre Dame, he embarks on a rampage across Paris to find her, ransacking the city and burning multiple buildings to the ground. By the end of the day, most of the city is in flames, the people who didn’t get locked up are screaming and running for their lives, and Frollo is still not satisfied as he hasn’t found Esmeralda. The terrifying choir chanting "Kyrie Eleison" during the establishing shot of the now burning Paris should affirm to anybody watching this is what hell looks like. What’s worse is that Frollo planned to one-up it with a mass public execution of hundreds of Romani the following day. Finally, during the climax, Quasimodo pours molten lead into the square below Notre Dame, creating a massive lake of fire that pours from the cathedral as if it’s God’s crucible for Frollo and his men. Fittingly, Frollo meets his end when after asking God to smite the wicked, he is obliged when he is cast into the molten lake.
• On South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, this happens when Sheila Broflovski executes Terrence and Phillip.

Films — Live-Action

• Constantine (2005) has Satan's son Mammon and the Big Bad Gabriel trying to bring Hell to Earth.
• Demon Knight. Roach doesn't care about Hell on Earth — he's got hemorrhoids.
• Doctor Mordrid: The Evil Sorcerer Kabal's goal is to unleash his horde of hellspawn from where they are locked up in the Magic Dimension.
• End of Days: Satan tries to use a specifically-chosen woman to help him sire The Antichrist. This will then somehow allow him to permanently open a portal to Hell and turn the world into a fiery hellscape.
• Faust: Love of the Damned: "M"'s plan is to bring about about Hell on Earth. Who would have thought?
• In the climax of Hellboy (2019), the villainess, Nimue, attempts to unleash the forces of hell into the world of living, and actually succeeds in opening a portal from hell in London, where hordes and hordes of demons then proceed to devour civilians en-masse, with a kaiju-sized monster destroying the Tower Bridge. Hellboy puts an end to her plans by killing her, resulting in the portal in London sucking all the demons back and then closing.
• Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth. The title is a dead giveaway. Specifically, Pinhead Unbound wants to turn Earth into a Cenobite hellworld. He continues with this goal in mind in Hellraiser: Bloodline.
• Kull the Conqueror: When Kull tells Akivasha the Red Witch to go to hell after she tells him they can rule together, she retorts that he shouldn't be in a hurry — she's already planning to bring hell to her kingdom instead.
• In Swimming to Cambodia, Spalding Gray thinks the world is bad enough as is.
  Spalding: Who needs metaphors for hell, or poetry about hell? This actually happened, here on this earth. Pregnant mothers disemboweled, eyes gouged out. Kids, children, torn apart like fresh bread in front of their mothers. And this went on for years until two million people were either systematically killed or starved to death.
• The Satan-like monster, Zaigorg, from Ultraman X The Movie: Here Comes! Our Ultraman!, who intends to resurrect an army of Demaarga "Hell-Demon Beasts" on earth, and have his Demaarga army wipe out most of the world as Zaigorg himself rules over his army. He actually succeed in resurrecting five of his monsters in five major cities - Shanghai, Lucerne, Cairo, Buenos Aries and Chicago - and would've succeeded in wiping out the rest of the world, if not for the Ultramen's intervention.
• Warlock: The Armageddon has its title character, the son of Satan, trying to bring his master to earth and bring about this scenario.
• The goal of the Djinn in Wishmaster is to make the world his hellish kingdom, for which he needs to grant three wishes to the one who awakened him to open the portal to the Djinn dimension and unleash their hordes upon mankind.

Literature

• Older Than Feudalism: The Bible: The Biblical Tribulation and Armageddon.
• Some mythologies say that at the end of time, the dead or damned would overrun the Earth, either leading it to be a utopia (some Native American religions), or signaling the time of Ragnarok (Norse Mythology).
• In James Blish's Black Easter, the Valley of Death materializes (appropriately enough) at Death Valley.
• In the Ciaphas Cain novel The Traitor's Hand, a Slaneeshi cult is trying to turn a planet into a warp portal where daemons can enter the physical plane at will.
• Mike Carey's Felix Castor novels
• This is the ultimate plan of The Nameless One in the Griffin's Daughter Trilogy: He plans to open a portal to the demon world and use a magical artifact to turn the demons into his personal army. That the world gets turned into the demons' playground is a bonus for him.
• Oliver Twisted: The setting of the story occurs after demons and monsters alike from the underworld invade the Earth and sink their darkness into the heart of society. Part of Oliver's Either/Or Prophecy involves him undoing the process and shutting them all in hell forever.
• Out of the Silent Planet: Earth is known as the Silent Planet because it has been cut off from the Solar System and taken over by malevolent, multi-dimensional beings. Ransom is astonished to learn this, only to remember that Jesus and the Gospel-writers basically say the same thing when calling the Devil "the prince of this world." Ransom learns from the Martians that the Devil is very much real, and has been responsible for cutting humanity off from their original language, eternal life, and the endless love of Maleldil the Young.
• Technomancer by MK Gibson: Demons have evacuated Hell and now rule Earth. They have managed to establish themselves in gleaming Neon City style cyberpunk dystopias while the rest of the world has degenerated into becoming lawless wastelands.
• In Paradise Lost, this is Satan's goal, for a time. It marks one of the last stages of his Villain Decay: his goals subtly become simpler and more destructive over the course of the poem. First he wants to conquer Heaven, then he wants to conquer Earth, and then he just wants to make Earth into Hell out of spite. It's implied that, since Satan carries his own personal suffering (his "Hell") inside of him, he'll try and make any place he ends up more like Hell.
• This is the plot of the final series of Warrior Cats, as Tigerstar has claimed authority over the Place With No Stars and has launched a invasion of the mortal realm with every other villain at his beck and call.

Live-Action TV

• Angel''s fourth season featured the Beast blotting out the sun, making L.A. a haven for vampires.
  • And the end of Season 5 and After The Fall gave us the Hell-A demon playground, at least until it was undone.
  • According to both Buffy herself — after her trip to Heaven — and a dead lawyer representing Wolfram & Hart in his speech to Angel, Earth is Hell, at least for all intents and purposes. It is Crapsack World with all the usual crime and poverty and wars and so on that make it imperfect enough in itself, but it is also run by a conspiracy of demons who are engineering all these things as well as the apocalypse For the Evulz (in fact, the apocalypse is already underway- the heroes were so distracted the bad guys had to tell them You Are Too Late), to say nothing of all the unaligned vampires and monsters and demons who just murder and maim for their own private jollies.
• During the Grand Finale of Ash vs. Evil Dead, the Dark Ones unleash mass possessions around the world, leading to chaos as Deadites start running amok everywhere.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  • The Wishverse, which was created when Cordelia wished that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale, definitely counts as this.
  • Glory intended to use Dawn to get home. This would incidentally cause every other dimension to fuse into earth, leading to massive influx of demons. The Master also intended to open the Hellmouth to cause this.
• In the episode "Isis" from Smallville, the goddess of the same name possesses Lois Lane and tries to reassemble and resurrect her husband Osiris, because the latter was condemned to rule the underworld for all eternity. Raising him would also mean raising his kingdom.
• In Supernatural, Sam breaks the final seal by killing Lilith and Lucifer is unleashed from his imprisonment. Lucifer's intention is to do this, making Hell on Earth. Ironically the demons aren't to be a part of it, as the Archangel absolutely despises them and wants to wipe them out along with the humans, so he can preserve his Father's last flawless creation.

Tabletop Games

• Obviously, Deadlands: Hell on Earth. The demons in question were the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
• Dungeons & Dragons: The 5e sourcebook "Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes" likens demons to a virus that infects reality itself, and suggests that they create the risk of this trope any time they find themselves anywhere other than their home plane, the Abyss. Even a lone demon can, in theory, corrupt the area around it with chaotic energy that manifests as bizarre and destructive phenomena, eventually ripping open a Hell Gate which brings more demons into the plane, who in turn bring more chaotic energy to spread the corruption faster and strengthen the portal. This vicious cycle continues until the Hell Gate becomes stable enough to allow one of the Demon Lords to enter the plane, mark it as their territory and incorporate it as a new layer of the Abyss. Thankfully, doing enough damage to the landscape to open a Hell Gate would require the demon to stay in one spot for several years, and most demons are too easily bored to care about that.
• In Exalted, the Yozis are trying to cause an unusually literal form of this trope. Thanks to their surrender oaths, they're physically incapable of leaving Hell... so their big plan is to have their agents corrupt all Creation until it's indistinguishable from Hell, thus rendering the distinction moot. (Or at least, on paper. The real plan the mastermind of the above plan has is to sneak out alone and shut the door behind him... He'll still do Hell On Earth, of course, but just for his amusement.)
• In the fan-made Feng Shui adventure, "The Day the Human Race Died," a critical shift results in Hell On Earth as the demons take over and round up humans in concentration camps to be exterminated. One of the PCs is even the commandant of one of the camps, and sweet little Shih Yet Kwai, who the PCs rescued from a Serial Killer in a previous adventure, pulls a Sarah Connor and becomes the leader of the human resistance against the demons. The heroes have to battle a demon worshipping ninja cult aboard the Titanic as it's about to get sunk in order to get things back to normal.
• In Magic: The Gathering we have the Phyrexian invasion. After a certain point, the invasion continued by way of physically overlaying another plane, filled with millions of demonic soldiers, onto Dominaria. Fortunately, Urza had been running The Plan across thousands of years to prepare but it very nearly wasn't enough. The Phyrexians would later go on to infect the plane of Mirrodin, with much better results if you're a Phyrexian.
• Warhammer: The poles of the planet are home to the remains of a Portal Network created by the Old Ones, through which raw magic pours into the world to twist the landscape. When the gates first collapsed — in an event called the Great Catastrophe or the Coming of Chaos — it marked the end of the Old Ones and their works as the Legions of Hell invaded the world and killed everything they could reach. Only the creation of the Great Vortex of Ulthuan, a sort of arcane sink that drains excess magic out of the world, stopped the demon tide and allowed the world to rebuild. The lands around the broken star gates, known as the Chaos Wastes, remain inhospitable Eldritch Locations that serve as the setting's ultimate Mordor.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Daemons of Chaos invade mortal worlds every now and then, either because of a Warp Storm, an unfortunate psyker getting possessed, or simply because the daemons managed to tear a rift in reality. Unless the Inquisition manages to stop the daemonic incursion, things tend to get very, very bad for the inhabitants of the unfortunate world. Even if the incursion is contained, things tend to get bad for the inhabitants of the world, as the Inquisition usually judges them to be tainted by Chaos and purges them all, just in case.
  • To make things worse, because the number of psykers born is increasing every year, and the Astronomican (Humanity's source for Faster-Than-Light Travel) is losing power, daemonic incursions are becoming more and more common. One fifth of the galaxy overlaps with the Warp.
  • Daemon Worlds, as the name indicates, are planets where Chaos has won and the Warp and reality start coexisting in the same place, something that isn't good for sanity.
• Pathfinder:
  • First Edition had the Worldwound, a place where the Abyss leeched into Golarion. Demons openly ruled it and were only kept from overrunning Golarion by a magical fence of obelisks called the Wardstones. The land is steeped in chaotic energies and extraplanar horrors. Closing the Worldwound is the objective of the Wrath of the Righteous adventure path (and video game).
  • The Tanglebriar is a less well-known nightmare, this one a destroyed forest overrun with toxic forrest and nightmarish fungi run by Treerazer, a nascent demon lord. It's a hell of twisted growth, fungi, and parasites.
  • Second edition has closed the Worldwound, but the nation of Lastwall has been splatted with a nightmarish zombie apocalypse resulting in it being a Hell on Earth of the Undead variety.

Video Games

• In Darkstalkers, Earth is in the process of merging with the demon world, Makai.
• Technically it's not Earth, but this is what Zenon's Curse does in Disgaea 2.
• Doom:
  • The original Doom ends with this, with you returning to Earth only to find it overrun by Hellspawn.
  • The sequel Doom II: Hell on Earth involves you dealing with the demonic invasion that was revealed to begin at the end of the first game, and you handle it the only way you know.
  • Dr. Betruger's ultimate plan in Doom³ involves bringing the demons that he unleashed on Mars to Earth.
  • Doom Eternal returns to this setting as a follow-up to the 2016 remake's Mars setting. Naturally, it's a modernized remake of Doom II, much as the 2016 game is a remake of the original Doom. The tagline is even "Raze Hell".
• In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion the main quest consists of trying to prevent an invasion from the Realm of Oblivion led by the Daedric Prince of Destruction Mehrunes Dagon. You ultimately fail to prevent the invasion, leading to Martin Septim sacrificing himself to become an avatar of the Aedra Akatosh who defeats Dagon and seals Tamriel away from Oblivion. Centuries later in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim the seal is still holding strong, hence the reduced presence of Daedra in the game.
• Infernals and Hell terrain the Fall from Heaven mod for Civilization 4.
• Near the end of Final Fantasy II, the Emperor fresh out of dying, taking over Hell, and returning as a demon raises the castle of Pandaemonium where his capital of Palamecia stood. Guess what The Very Definitely Final Dungeon is?
• Hellbound is set decades after experimentations from earth scientists accidentally opened a portal leading to hell, causing legions upon legions of demons to invade the human world. You play as a revived half-demon who must battle the armies of hell to salvage what's left of humanity.
• Heroes of Might and Magic Ashan has the Inferno faction consisting of the demon followers of the Chaos Dragon Urgash sealed within the prison dimension of Sheogh. The Demon Sovereign Kha-Beleth schemes to break free and invade Ashan. The seal periodically weakens enough for demons to invade, but Kha-Beleth wants to break it permanently. This drives the plot of Heroes V and its expansions and the spinoff game Dark Messiah.
• League of Legends has a skin-based Elseworld, "High Noon Gothic", which mashes up this concept with tropes of the Wild West. In the backstory, humanity had invaded Heaven in a land rush and accidentally destroyed it, and without stability upstairs, the legions of Hell began swarming the west. A good chunk of the line's skins depict hellbeasts razing the desert plains, offset by the few angel warriors that remain and the mortal humans packing their own heat.
• In Legend of Legaia, Conkram and Rim Elm^note After being engulfed by Juggernaut are both referred to as being this, though each place is more accurately described the unholy spawn of a Womb Level and Mordor.
• In Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark, the game's story starts with an invasion of dark elves, but takes a turn when the source of their power turns out to be an enslaved arch-devil who breaks free and raises an army of wraiths to Take Over the World. Not that he cares about the world; his goal is to make it into a new layer of Baator (aka. Hell) in order to take over Baator as well.
• Since every Demon in Nexus Clash is a player character and the Earthlike world of Valhalla is the most popular plane in the meta, most demonic forces are much more interested in invading Valhalla than remaining in their hellish home plane of Stygia. Since Valhalla is the battleground upon which the fate of the universe depends, their patron deities in-universe couldn't agree more with these priorities.
• In The Secret World, areas near hellgates.
• Shin Megami Tensei.
  • In Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, you can make Earth into Hell. As in, a world for demons until the next Conception occurs.
  • In Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, a Negative Space Wedgie known as the Schwarzwelt is spreading across the Earth and a research team is sent in to investigate. What they find inside is an Ironic Hell representing humanity's sins, filled with demons whose leaders are hostile at best towards humanity. The angels who oppose the demons are just as bad.
  • Devil Survivor has a contained outbreak within the Yamanote Loop. In two endings, demonkind breaks out of Tokyo into the rest of the world, either under the Protagonist's command and making war against the angels, or uncontrolled and free to wreak havoc upon the weak.
• The entries in the Silent Hill series which involve the Order and its God imply that a successful birth of God would result in Hell on earth. Whether or not this is possible is actually questionable, but the easy assumption is that the result would resemble the Otherworld, so none of the protagonists ever feel inclined to let it happen and find out.
  • Well, it depends on which part of the Order you listen to. Some think their god will bring about Paradise (above-said Otherworld, which may or may not simply reflect an individual's or group's psyche), while others think the Hell On Earth will simply be the purifying flames that will ready the "wicked world" for the TRUE Paradise... Considering that their beliefs are a mish-mosh of evangelical Christianity, apocryphal pseudo-demonology and misapplied Native American beliefs, and there are a minimum of three distinct sub-cults within the Order and the entire town might possibly also have simply been driven mad by hallucinogenic drugs that were smoked up in a fire/explosion or any other number of effects (it's that kind of series), it's no wonder there's such a broad selection of interpretations.
• Tales of Monkey Island: More like "Hell on the Caribbean" in Chapter 5, since LeChuck has regained his voodoo powers after killing Guybrush and has captured Elaine. And since Guybrush isn't around to stop him, the villain not only pillages and plunders the islands in the Gulf of Melange, but he also destroys Spinner Cay, damages Flotsam (where Guybrush has fallen, though his decaying body survives intact in Club 41), slaughters many people and some Vaycaylians (and a few animal species), and sets fire to many islands, creating his own Villain World that is right between Class 0 and Class 1. (It gets a bit worse when the Crossroads are opened, and he becomes a Demon Pirate God.) Thankfully, the entire Gulf of Melange starts getting better once Guybrush comes Back from the Dead and destroys him once and for all.
• Warcraft III, Diablo, and Hellgate: London. All by the same folks. ^note Hellgate was made by a group of former Blizzard developers.
• The Legion expansion to World of Warcraft entails a large portal being opened from Azeroth, enabling the Burning Legion to invade. Your main mission is to get all of the Pillars of Creation to seal the portal, but then Illidan and Velen take everything off the rails and decide sealing the portal isn't enough, and they want to go on the offensive and end the Burning Legion once and for all.
• Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous brings us to the Worldwound, a literal demonic invasion of the pulp fantasy world of Golarion with no skimping on just how ugly and varied the Abyss is. The goal is throwing back the demons.

Webcomics

• This became the case in Deviant Universe when Omega ruled over Earth, with the global population of super villains making things worse.
• Sluggy Freelance: The story "That Which Redeems". The world the demons invade is otherwise so nice and correct that one of the subchapters is titled "BLEEP on Earth."
• In The Young Protectors, the Annihilator offers up half the world to this fate at the hands of the demon lord Laampros, in exchange for the time and power to prevent the walls of reality from shattering and dumping the entire planet into Hell. Comments by his Time Abyss collaborator hint that this used to be the default state of things before the Walls were created.

Web Original

• Inverted in The Salvation War. Hell breaks into Earth, Earth pushes them back and breaks into Hell.

Western Animation

• In Castlevania (2017), Dracula summons an army of night creatures from Hell to destroy humanity in revenge for burning his wife Lisa at the stake. One of his devilforge masters, Issac, sees it as his duty to create as many night creatures as possible not only to fulfill Dracula's desires, but out of a religious interpretation of the Prophet Muhammad.
• In Gravity Falls, Bill Cipher wishes to fuse Earth's home dimension with the nightmare dimension he and other demons live in and control. Once that happens, they'll be able to do whatever they want to the people living there, subjecting them to whatever bizarre torments they enjoy performing. You get to see what his world will look like as the Grand Finale approaches. DO NOT expect to sleep well.
• On one episode of Disney's Hercules: The Animated Series, Hades tricks Poseidon into diverting the river Styx so that Athens becomes part of the Underworld, and turns Herc's school into an Ironic Hell.
• Jackie Chan Adventures: In the Season 1 finale, Shendu tries to unleash his army of demonic dragon minions from Another Dimension so he can use them to destroy all of Asia and then conquer the world. In Season 5, Drago intends to unleash extradimensional demons on the Earth and make Earth a demon world with him ruling supreme.
• Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated: After being freed from his sarcophagus, the Nibiru Entity transforms Crystal Cove into this as its minions captured its citizens and gave them to him to devour.
• The Simpsons:
  • In the episode where Homer thinks that the Apocalypse is occurring after watching a parody of the Left Behind films, no one actually believes him, and as a result one night, Homer actually imagines himself going to Heaven and notice this happening to Earth on one of God's monitors.
  • Before that, there is also the episode where the family falls asleep through church and dreams themselves into biblical stories- when they awake, they find everyone else has left, and are embarrassed, but Homer shrugs it off saying "its not the end of the world." As soon as they open the door, they find that — yes, it is.
• Superjail!:
  • In the episode "Burn Stoolie Burn" the Warden and Ash go on massive arson spree which causes the Portal Door to Hell to open and then the episode ends..
  • The episode after this, "Superhell!" expands on this.
• This shows up in Teen Titans (2003), of all places — creating this is the goal of season four's Big Bad, and he actually succeeds, frying the planet to an ash-choked cinder populated by demons and killing all the mortal inhabitants (or turning them to stone, which isn't exactly better, and might even be worse). Mercifully, the effects are reversed by the Anti-Anti-Christ, an Enemy Mine team-up, and much awesome.

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