Zuul
The Gatekeeper of Gozer: the Terror Dog in Dana Barrett's refrigerator that possessed her in 1984 and Callie Spengler in Afterlife.
Zuul is one of the two Terror Dogs that serve Gozer the Gozerian in the Ghostbusters franchise. As the Gatekeeper, Zuul is paired with Vinz Clortho the Keymaster; the pair are fully corporeal possessors who take over a woman and a man and perform a rite that opens a portal for their master. Zuul is the first supernatural name heard in the 1984 film: Dana Barrett tells the Ghostbusters that a demonic dog-like creature in her refrigerator spoke a single word, 'Zuul'. Peter Venkman later learns that Zuul was a demigod worshipped as a servant of Gozer, a shape-shifting god of destruction.
Background
Zuul's true form is a bipedal demon; in the physical world it appears as a horned, four-legged hound, originally one of the twin gargoyles on the roof of 550 Central Park West. In Ghostbusters (1984) it possesses Dana Barrett, who greets Peter as 'the Gatekeeper', while Vinz Clortho takes her neighbour Louis Tully. Once the containment unit is shut down the two hosts meet at the rooftop temple, open the gate between dimensions and transform into Terror Dogs so that Gozer can arrive.
After the Ghostbusters cross their proton streams at the gateway, Zuul and Vinz are forced back to their own dimension and Dana is rescued from the wreckage. In Ghostbusters: Afterlife the Terror Dogs guard Gozer's temples, including the one in Ivo Shandor's mine at Summerville, Oklahoma, where they have fought Egon Spengler for 27 years. Zuul possesses Egon's daughter Callie and unites with Vinz, now possessing Gary Grooberson, to summon Gozer. Podcast re-captures Zuul in a trap, freeing Callie, but when the trap is opened again Zuul jumps to Lucky Domingo before the whole group is finally caught in Egon's field of buried ghost traps.
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Elsewhere in Ghostbusters
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