The Legions of Hell



Demons. Abominations. Monsters. Fallen Angels. Door-To-Door salesmen. There is a place where they go to, and a place from which they spring. Simply calling it Another Dimension doesn't do it justice.

They are legion, for their numbers are many, and their powers are diverse.

Sometimes Mooks of Satan or a God of Evil (who—depending on the setting and/or the author's worldview—may or may not be the same person/thing), and residing in Fire and Brimstone Hell (or the real deal). There may or may not be heavenly equivalents, and either one can be treated in a Crystal Dragon Jesus manner. Heck, if they're in a Hentai work, they may even have tentacles.

The Shinto version of the afterlife is markedly different from the Christian version; thus, in Anime not influenced by western notions of Hell and demons, Hell acts more Chaotic Neutral than evil regardless of how it looks, especially the classic Buddhist and Chinese versions. Demons will be more like administrators than tormentors, often taken to the extreme.

However, if Good Hurts Evil, one wonders why the heroes don't just "accidentally" let a nun, monk, priest, child, angel, or other nice being walk in and 'crash the gate shut with a resounding bang and atomized, no, disintegrated the great forces of evil.'

See also: Bonus Level of Hell, for guys slightly higher on the infernal totem-pole see Demon Lords and Archdevils. For the non-demonic version: Alien Invasion.

Anime & Manga

 * The demons of Devilman, led by Satan himself. They also showed up in a Crossover movie with Mazinger Z.
 * Angel Sanctuary tells the story of war between angels and demons. Among other things, the demons are the good guys....
 * Not so much the good guys as the less evil guys. God himself is mostly absent.
 * Except towards the end, where he shows himself to be a Complete Monster.
 * The forces of Hell and Heaven seem more like rival sports teams than vicious enemies in Ah! My Goddess, but even so the demons can be nasty.
 * The Di C dub of Sailor Moon lumped all of the show's villains and monsters from the first two seasons into a single evil force called the "Negaverse".
 * In the original manga, they were all forms of the God of Evil Chaos.
 * In Bleach, Hell is not among the villains. In one episode, the Soul Reapers defeat a fallen ghost who was also a serial killer during his life. A Soul Reaper cannot purify sins made by the living, so the Gate of Hell opens up and a demon reaches out and grabs the damned soul.
 * Much better in the manga where the giant demon impales him on an equally giant sword.
 * On the other hand, Hueco Mundo ("Hollow World") is a poster child of this trope. The Hollows themselves were the early antagonists, and the series's Big Bad eventually sets up shop there.
 * In the latest film we meet the "Togabito" (defilers), who are the humanoid denizens of Hell.
 * The dead villains from Dragon Ball were shown in hell from time to time. Due to censorship issues at the time, any time in the dub the word "HELL" was on a uniform or on the wall, it was edited to "HFIL" or "Home For Infinite Losers." This is the subject of amusement and/or eyerolling among fans.
 * The demons of Berserk are quite powerful, diverse and horrific. Every one of them were once humans who got hold of a Behelit and sold their souls and sacrificed those closest to them to the demonic gods of the Godhand in exchange for being reborn as demons. The Godhand themselves are servants of . Needless to say, Berserk's world is every bit of a crappy place to live as the Warhammer 40000 universe.
 * And, with the existence of Feudal worlds in 40k, it's quite easy to WMG that they're the same 'verse.
 * No two Orphans from Mai-HiME are alike, and their presence is made even more eerie once the characters (and the viewers) realize where (and who) they're coming from.
 * The Hundred Demon Empire of Getter Robo G. The Dragon of the organization looks like Hitler with demon horns. Like a bonus, his name is "Hidler".
 * The Youma Empire of Raideen
 * The Guze no Tomogarra (Denizens of the Crimson Realm in the dub) and their Rinne servants from Shakugan no Shana.
 * Ronin Warriors had Talpa's Dynasty Soldiers, a seemingly endless supply of Faceless Goons.
 * Pulled off in the 10th episode of Kanokon, when a horde of them attack the school. When he reaches his Five-Tailed Form, Kouta lets loose an expanding energy wave that completely obliterates the horde of baddies (save their leader, who flees).
 * The Lucifer Hawke/Lucifer Folk from Silent Moebius.
 * The enemy forces of the Demon Wars from Sakura Taisen.
 * The Invaders from Gate Keepers and Gatekeepers 21.
 * The Arigami from Blue Seed.
 * Thoroughly subverted by Bakuen Campus Guardress.
 * Even more thoroughly subverted by Hyper Police, in which the invasion is long over and the demons are a normal part of the landscape (to the point where humans are a rare and protected species).
 * Mahou Sensei Negima: Negi's hometown was doomed by one of those. Is not clear if they do come from Hell, but they are called demons anyway.
 * Then later on,  summons an army of several hundred thousand demons. Same as above, it's not stated whether they're actually from hell, though.
 * Just a bit later, we are (re)introduced to Zazie Rainyday, and too. They are heavily implied to be from hell.
 * The Dark Liege Army in Nora. Subverted in the fact that they're actually the good guys.

Comicbooks

 * Shows up from time to time in The DCU. Teen Titans has had to deal with Trigon, Superman has traded blows with Karkull, and even Batman has fought both alongside and against Etrigan the Rhyming Demon. The Sandman makes quite a few visits there as well.
 * Mephisto and his son Blackheart serve as the rulers of a Hell-like dimension in the Marvel Universe. They are responsible for the creation of any number of heroes and villains, such as Ghost Rider (who sold his soul) and Dr. Doom (who tried to access Mephisto's dimension to save his mother's soul, but wound up scarring his own face). Blackheart was the primary villain of the Ghost Rider movie, with bookend appearances by Mephistopheles.
 * Marvel has been largely inconsistent in its portrayal of hell (largely due, it seems, to an unwillingness to flatly confirm or deny the existence of God in the comics, quite unlike DC). The current Ghost Rider series had Satan himself (not Mephisto, Satannish or any other almost-Satan Marvel has used in the past). For the most part, Marvel seems to go with the idea that there are many different hells, with many different devils.
 * Originally Johnny Blaze had made a deal with the same Satan that was the father of Daimon Hellstrom (Son of Satan, natch) and Satanna, who definitely was NOT Mephisto.
 * Note that part of the inconsistency has been explained by the fact that demons lie all the time.
 * The Neyaphem, a race of exiled demonic mutants led by Azazel, who is also the father of Abyss, Kiwi Black, and Nightcrawler.
 * Spawn got his superpowers under the conditions of leading the Legions of Hell. He ended up not, but he still kept the powers.
 * In Lucifer a damned but repentent human soul, Christopher Rudd becomes The Messiah of Hell, and leads the demons and the damned together against the Lilim attempting to conquer the Silver City...and conquer it themselves as revenge for the injustice of allowing Hell to exist.

Films

 * In Army of Darkness, a bunch of dead bodies are possessed by demons released by the Necromonicon Ex Mortis. They attack a medieval castle, and it's up to Ash, his chainsaw, and his boomstick to defeat them.
 * The Gate has some kids accidentally summon demons in their backyard by contrived coincidence.

Literature

 * In Clive Barker's short story Hellbound Heart, and the Hellraiser films and graphic novels based on it, the Legions of Hell are the Cenobites (a word originally meaning simply monks in monastic orders, as distinct from "eremites" or hermit monks). Hell is not a place for punishment of sins as such—souls are lured there simply by the temptation of solving puzzles.
 * In Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, the characters end up storming Hell and facing down the legions to recover their daughter.
 * In Robert A. Heinlein's Magic, Inc., the characters demand of the king of Hell, according to Hell's customs, that he let them inspect his legions looking for their enemy.
 * Discworld has the Dungeon Dimensions as the home of its Legions of Hell.
 * Technically the Dungeon Dimensions are a home for the Eldritch Abominations, while the Legions of Hell are more amiable and bureaucratic, and reside in various Hells produced by the human imagination.
 * The "feeders" from Terry Brooks' The Knight of the Word novels almost fit the trope. Though they're dark and oozy and scary, they aren't very dangerous; they're more harbingers of evil than evil itself.
 * There are actual demons in that series, the servants of a being called the Void, but there aren't really enough of them to call a "legion" (and they seem to have a hard time working with each other anyway). The highest number of demons ever seen together was four, and that was an explicitly unusual case.
 * Demons swarmed out of the Darkwood in Simon R. Green's Blue Moon Rising. In Beyond the Blue Moon, it turned out that.
 * Paradise Lost features the legions named in a device called an "epic catalogue". Usually used to name the various heroes on the quest (see The Iliad for a classic example), this version instead mentions the various gods of other religions who form the forces of Satan.
 * The Belgariad and The Malloreon feature demons as a one-shot problem in the former, and a serious threat in the latter. The series makes a point of stating that even a normal Demon can't be fought without sorcery, another Demon, or the aid of a God; one of the antagonists is able to usurp control of an entire country just by threatening to unleash his hordes of Demons. Naturally the two Demon Lords who put in an appearance later are just shy of indestructible.
 * The Dresden Files delivers in its usual fantasy-kitchen-sink fashion. Demons, Fallen Angels, the Devil, and all other shades of Hell exist, alongside all of Heaven, and the Nevernever, with the Fae, whos Blue and Orange Morality isn't evil per se but is often fairly destructive.
 * Earlier in the series, Demons had more of a presence in the story, temptations and all, but their place was usurped by the Fae. Lately, only the "Nickleheads" (Fallen Angels with mortal hosts) have made much of a presence for the Down-Below team.
 * A big point of the series is that while Good and Evil are real, a lot more to life takes place in the grey, orange, and blue. Being a good person is about always working hard at doing the right thing and being clever about it, not necessarily fighting those Legions of Hell. That said, good, strong people also fight Evil. It's just one of the things they do.
 * The Legions of Hell feature prominently in the Riftwar Cycle, particularly the Serpentwar and Demonwar subseries. Essentially, this setting has reality in metaphysical layers, with each layer being more dangerous than the one above it- any layers below yours can be considered hell (and yes, this means that the mortal world is considered part of hell by angels, who come from the upper levels). Demons come from the fourth and fifth layers of reality below the mortal world, and have repeatedly tried to conquer it in order to feed on the life force of its inhabitants. There's also the Dasati, from the layer immediately below ours, who aren't demons per se but as an Exclusively Evil Proud Warrior Race they're still plenty nasty and their reality is the first level of hell from a human perspective. On the levels below The Legions of Hell you start getting really bad things.

Live-Action TV

 * Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Series/Angel explained that there were a countless number of hells. Both Buffy and Angel have been to a few.
 * Brimstone was about a damned soul who made a deal with The Devil to get out of Hell, if he recaptured a set of other damned souls who had escaped.
 * Power Rangers has a few:
 * Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue and Power Rangers Mystic Force have the Shadow World/Spirit World where defeated monsters go and the Underworld where various movie-monster-themed villains reside, respectively. Both have involved the "release all denizens to bring about The End of the World as We Know It" plot as well as the heroes being sent there and having to make their way out.
 * Power Rangers Ninja Storm: A pit called the Abyss of Evil had a similar principle, where the 'evil energy' of a specific Big Bad's monsters could be sent, to cause an en masse monster resurrection upon overload.
 * In addition to sending the Rangers to monster hell (and always forgetting what they called it the last time) we have monsters that are the closest the series is willing to get to actual hellborn foes: Lightspeed Rescue's villains are explicitly called demons, and there's even one instance of a deal with one. Mystic Force's villains do come from a place called the Underworld and are ruled by a Cosmic Horror that has Demonic Possession in his arsenal. Power Rangers Samurai has the Nighloks, who come from the Sanzu River (the Japanese idea of the River Styx) which, conceptually, seems indistinguishable from the Underworld (Fleeting Demographic Rule.)
 * Supernatural had the legions of hell bust loose at the end of season two.
 * They fight them for the rest of the series, on and off, though not as much after defeating Satan at the end of Season Five, and less still in Seven, largely because they were so nerfed . Offscreen Moment of Awesome when the angels (with Castiel apparently taking point, or at least the last survivor of those who took point) laid siege to Hell and cut their way in to rescue Dean, allowing him to make Like a Badass Out of Hell without giving in to Power Creep much. (Dean actually took a hit to his power after Hell due to PTSD, though in the Bad Future he was using his education there for Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique.)
 * Sam had Power Creep that season, but it was a bad thing. Cas had it in season six. It was a bad thing again. Supernatural is strict about these matters.
 * There is subtle creep, in that in early seasons they could barely handle a single demon, while late in six Dean takes a whole series prisoner in the attempt to torture info out of them. The last one flattens him once it gets out due to overconfident carelessness, though, so it's really all a matter of refinement of technique due to practice.

Music

 * Seen in Fireaxe's Food for the Gods, although in this case the army was composed not only of demons, but of damned souls who were very pissed off about where they'd ended up.

Tabletop Games

 * In the Old World of Darkness RPG Demon: The Fallen, demons that escaped from Hell are the player characters; the angels have long since vanished. Whether the demons are antiheroes or atoners is up to the player. Their former allies have become the Earthbound, who have gone mad from indeterminate amounts of time being Sealed Evil in a Can.
 * Similarly, the Spectres fulfill this role in Wraith: The Oblivion, with the Malfeans being the overlords waiting til they get to eat reality. The various servants of the Wyrm in Werewolf: The Apocalypse might also count.
 * The New World of Darkness has, as of Inferno, introduced Hell into the setting. Hell plays host to a number of demons that are born of the first fleeting moments of human wickedness, who occasionally come to humans and offer them great power for a little price... For extra fun, ghosts and 'regular' spirits can be corrupted into demons too.
 * One of the main factions in Warhammer 40000 is Chaos, spewing forth from the Eye of Terror: a rift in spacetime that allows access to the Warp, a nightmare realm made of the emotions and thoughts of the entirety of sapient life in the galaxy.
 * The older Warhammer Fantasy Battle Fantasy Battle game also includes Chaos as a faction, with the same lineup of evil gods. In addition to Demonic Invaders, the Chaos army also includes tainted mortal warriors and twisted beastmen, all sweeping down from the Grim Up North and corrupted forests.
 * Don't forget the actual Legion of the Damned, who are the ghosts of dead space marines, that show up on the battlefield to aid fellow Marines when the need is great. They sport armor emblazoned with flames and scorched bones, and they are described as being like smoky shadows in appearance, flickering like a flame in the wind as they plod across the battlefield.
 * Dungeons and Dragons draws a distinction between Devils, who are Lawful Evil and Demons, who are Chaotic Evil. The former are a race of Chessmasters who seek to conquer the universe, where as the later are out to destroy all of creation. Each has their own home plane: The Nine Hells of Baator for the devils, and The infinite Layers of the Abyss for the demons.
 * Devils even include "Legion Devils"... the literal Legions of Hell.
 * Don't forget the Neutral Evil Daemons, although the developers of the new edition seem to have done so.
 * Yugoloths fit best with the Demons, so they were all shipped to the Abyss in 4th Ed.
 * Like the WoD example above, another Tabletop Game, In Nomine, gave players a chance to enact this trope as demons operating on Earth. Unlike the above example, however, it gave an equal chance to fight for the other side, too.
 * Well, not so equal, because Angels have higher stats, and a military organization to support them. Demons have to work undercover and are more weak. The reason? All of this is a Game, and God is a cheater...
 * Exalted has a really bizarre hell. It's ruled over by the Yozis (who created the world and ruled over it until the Exalted deposed them), and the Can keeping them Sealed Evil in a Can is the inside-out body of the mightiest of their number. Each Yozi has a large number of souls, which are the immensely powerful Third Circle Demons. Those have souls which are the Second Circle Demons, and all of the above created the hordes of Mooks that are First Circle Demons.
 * Exalted also has the Underworld, the inverted shadow of Creation created when the Exalted armies killed some of the Primordials, the beings that created the universe. Killing beings who could not die caused so much chaos that the Exalted decided to seal the rest of the Primordials away instead of killing them, turning them into the Yozis. Because the Primordials were outside the limits of death and time, however, they didn't actually die but instead became creatures now known as the Neverborn, intent on ending their existence by sending their own legions of the dead to take the rest of Creation down with them.
 * Infernum is a third-party setting that uses the 3.5 rules for Dungeons and Dragons and, as the name suggests, this trope is all over it. In fact, the default assumption is that the party members are demons. It has heavy roots in Christian beliefs, mainly Dante's Inferno, but is twisted and changed into its own unique setting. For a start, the demons are the result of vile crossbreeding experiments conducted between rebellious angels and "spawn" (prototypes of earthly lifeforms) in an effort to breed warrior-slaves... only for the demons to decide they didn't like the idea of being cannon fodder and promptly devour every last one of their "fathers" that didn't run for their life clean out of reality. Many demons at least profess not to believe in Heaven, and almost none believe that it's anything like the humans think it is (the Fallen Angels can't comment, having forgotten everything down to the reason why they Fell in the first place). There's also vague hints of even stranger forces in the multiverse; Benandanti are humans "touched" by nature spirits, whose souls travel to Hell in the guise of werewolves to steal souls to restore the vitality of nature, while Brokenlanders are the ghostly remnants of Quilipoth, another universe so ancient there's nothing left but a single ringworld orbiting the last dying cinder of a star.
 * The current story in Rifts is the "Minion War", a war between two separate Legions of Hell: The Demon of Hades, and the Deevils of Dyval. It's beginning to spill over into other dimensions.
 * Magic: The Gathering has a variety of demons and similar events. The best known legions scenario was in the Invasion block, which had the biomechanical horrors of Phyrexia invading the plane of Dominaria.
 * In Deadlands, the manitou are responsible for creating the Harrowed (intelligent zombies, with the manitou constantly struggling with the original personality for control over the body).

Videogames

 * Doom and its sequels involve an invasion from Hell. While many many video games (eg Quake, Half-Life) are based around monsters pouring forth from another realm, Doom is one of the few to go the whole hog and use Hell itself. (Both the contemporary novelization and the later movie avoided this, by using aliens and genetic engineering respectively.)
 * The Diablo video games are about the Legions of Hell attempting the world's destruction. While in the first part you venture ever deeper into ever more nightmarish caverns, in the second game the last act is in Hell, and in the third game, . The expansion to the second game is about an attempt to graft Hell and the mortal world together, and there are portals to Hell where you can go and loot stuff.
 * Oblivion and the Daedra from The Elder Scrolls games.
 * Mehrunes Dagon's Daedra & The Dremora (his favorite servants) are much like this due to their innate destructive impulses. Most lesser Daedra (and what passes for 'animals' in the daedric planes) are hostile to the majority of mortal peoples and wreak major havoc in Tamriel unless their leading Prince restrains them. The Princes themselves largely follow Blue and Orange Morality (occasionally happening to align with human virtues) and therefore do not fall completely under this trope unless they're in the mood for some genocide.
 * The Burning Legion in the Warcraft series, an army of demons whose goal is to unmake the universe. They scour all life from the planets they conquer, and the only beings they spare are those whom their leaders deem fit to be "recruited", corrupted and pressed into their crusade.
 * A important chunck of backstory for all Ogre Battle games was once that the Underworld's armies of Demons, Ogres and other such nasties invaded Earth, who were aided by Heaven's armies in the titular "Ogre Battle". The Underworld lost, but parts of the legions can still be summoned by humans. They are often very important plot point, like in Ogre Battle March of the Black Queen, where Rashidi contacts a General of said Legion, Galf or in Ogre Battle 64 is a bunch of Ogres being summoned by . However, in battle, you can persuade some of them to join you!
 * Most enemies in Ghosts N Goblins can be described thus.
 * The Strategy Game Disciples 2 has a playable faction called the Legions of the Damned, which is a literal use of this trope.
 * Just like in Disciples 1.
 * Painkiller is about the legions of Hell invading another world, although it's another afterlife instead of a physical world.
 * Purgatory, to be specific.
 * In Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark, Mephistopheles forms his army from the souls of betrayers sent to his realm after death
 * In Hellgate:London, demons have decided to start off their invasion of the world in London, and it's the players' task to stop them.
 * Final Fantasy II outright stated at the beginning that the Emperor of Palamecia summons these to launch his campaign for world conquest.
 * Members of The Legions of Hell feature in several Shin Megami Tensei games. Most notably so in Nocturne, in which the protagonist becomes half-demon, half-human that can survive The Conception thanks to the involvement of an oddly creepy child and an old man in a wheelchair.
 * Dante foils demonic puppets, demonic sand creatures, demonic clowns, demonic businessmen, demonic cultists, etc.
 * The Heartless of Kingdom Hearts are, as that trope describes, The Virus made from the 'darkness' in human hearts. The sequel adds gray-bodied Nobodies.
 * The Ing of Metroid Prime 2 are made reminiscent of this. They are just transdimensional beeings though. They possess creatures and even come from Dark Aether, a dimension that kills any "light creature" (anything that is not Ing) almost insantly.
 * The Darkspawn of Dragon Age Origins are a kind of plague Orcs. The Chantry's version of the Darkspawn taint's origin makes the Darkspawn seem demonic.
 * The game does feature actual demons as well, which are evil spirits from the Fade that possess the living or dead bodies of human beings, usually a mage due to their ability to go to the Fade in the first place, and feed upon the psychic energies of living beings. There are five ranks of demons; Rage, Hunger, Sloth, Desire and Pride, in order both of strength and intelligence of the complexity of the emotion they are feeding on. Destroying the host only sends the demon back to whence it came unharmed, and though some demons are able to manifest in the physical world alone, killing them seems to have the same effect. Their hosts usually mutate when possessed into a Humanoid Abomination of varying degrees of Body Horror. Demons are rarer than Darkspawn, but are broadly smarter, stronger and more dangerous.
 * The "Hidden Fun Stuff" that you come across if you dig too deep in Dwarf Fortress.
 * When this happens, it is usually the end of your fortress. Of course, this being Dwarf Fortress, you could just
 * The Legions of the Damned are one of the playable factions in the Disciples turn-based strategy series. Their leader, Bethrezen, is given a somewhat sympathetic backstory, but the Legion's Mooks are unquestionably the nastiest faction in the game.
 * The Bydo in R-Type are arguably this, even though they were created by humanity. Thing is, they were locked into a pocket dimension (read: the future Hell) after they proved to have Gone Horribly Right, and they were able to use it as a staging ground to attack humanity several centuries into the past. Now consider that there isn't all that much reason—at least, nothing mentioned in-game—to believe they would have restricted themselves to just the recent past...
 * In Bujingai Swordmaster the earth is overrun with demons of various kind. It's implied that their mooks (seen as golem-like warriors with seals and swords) were once humans turned into monsters by a strange radiation.
 * The Kreegan infestation in Might and Magic is (in-universe) commonly thought to be this (especially played up in Heroes of Might and Magic III). As it turns out, they are actually alien invaders that sweep across the Galaxy as a as a plague of locust... and happen to look like the common myths of devils and demons (or possibly have breeds that look like the actual devils and demons).
 * Ancient Domains of Mystery has the Forces of Chaos, an endless amount of reality-defying horrific beings from another dimension. They are invading the world of Ancardia, the setting of the game. They have The Corruption on their side, turning normal people and animals into more of them (after some Body Horror).
 * The Kreegan infestation in Might and Magic is (in-universe) commonly thought to be this (especially played up in Heroes of Might and Magic III). As it turns out, they are actually alien invaders that sweep across the Galaxy as a as a plague of locust... and happen to look like the common myths of devils and demons (or possibly have breeds that look like the actual devils and demons).
 * Ancient Domains of Mystery has the Forces of Chaos, an endless amount of reality-defying horrific beings from another dimension. They are invading the world of Ancardia, the setting of the game. They have The Corruption on their side, turning normal people and animals into more of them (after some Body Horror).

Webcomics

 * The Dimension of Pain from Sluggy Freelance fits this trope to a T, complete with being the launching pad for a demonic invasion of another, more peaceful dimension. Little is seen of the actual Hell, however, and even then it only appears in the B Side Comic.
 * Demons are trying to open a gateway into the world in Planes of Eldlor. Seeing as they are described as having an army at the ready, they are probably not looking to enter peacefully.
 * These used to exist in Dominic Deegan, until Karnak

Web Originals

 * Somewhat subverted in The Salvation War, where
 * Satan.
 * They may be killable, but they seem to live pretty much forever if they avoid a violent death.

Western Animation

 * In the South Park episode "Best Friends Forever," the forces of heaven fought back the forces of hell with the help of Kenny and a divine Sony PSP. The legions themselves owed much design- and action-wise to the Orcs from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films.
 * Ghosts, demons and dark gods in The Real Ghostbusters (and Extreme Ghostbusters) come from various places, sometimes other dimensions. The Ghostbusters capture them and put them into their "Containment Unit." Over the years, the Containment Unit's inner environment has become a type of Hell due to its growing number of inhabitants. Having to journey into the Containment Unit and battle old foes now teamed together, or the threat of the Containment Unit being broken open and bringing about The End of the World as We Know It, are common plots.
 * The Legions of Hell show up as the Mooks of the fourth season of Teen Titans, with their boss Trigon as Big Bad and Slade as The Dragon. They try to bring about The End of the World as We Know It and come within a hairsbreadth of succeeding. And yes, this is from a kids show that's normally a lighthearted action-comedy.
 * The setting of Jimmy Two-Shoes is heavily implied to be Hell, and in the original pitch it officially was. The citizens are just one of the reasons why its obvious it's Hell, with all the monsters and demons.
 * In Futurama: The Beast With a Billion Backs, Bender recruits an Army of the Damned from the Robot Devil to take over Earth. After every living being in the universe decides to move in with Yivo instead, he leads the army in a Pirate-themed attack on Yivo Shklerself.