Series / Bloodride

Bloodride is a Norwegian horror Anthology TV series released in Netflix and directed by Kjetil Indregard and Atle Knudsen.

The show follows various short horror stories about how multiple people end up in a strange, spectral bus.

The series first season was released in March 13th, 2020, with 6 episodes on Netflix.

Tropes

• Addictive Magic: The sacrificial stone in "Ultimate Sacrifice" can make people more unhinged if they don't use their powers carefully. Everyone is warned not to use it too much and use it with maximum effectiveness. Molly's impatience and lack of pets she really loves makes her use more constant.
• Ambiguous Situation: The bus itself. Is it driving people to the afterlife? Is it just some sort of Framing Device? This is muddled because some of the characters in the bus don't die in their respective stories (Katja, from "Ultimate Sacrifice" and the guests from "Lab Rats" both are there, but not die in these stories), as well as some characters there that aren't the protagonist there (like Paul, who is not the focus of "Elephant in the Room").
• Animal Motif: "Lab Rats" has a rat motif, especially white furred rats, as the characters are always compared to rats both by the cinematography (such as overlaying the scenes of them with the rats in the gas chamber) and by themselves in text.
• Anthology: Each episode of the show is a self-contained horror story.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: Played with. While the neighbors of "Ultimate Sacrifice" are shown as amiable if a little weird, even though they sacrifice animals, and that seems to be because they use the stone responsibly and truly love the animals they have. Molly is shown much more unhinged because she cares so little about her sacrifices.
• Creepy Child: The Stolen Children, as it turns out that they really are demons.
• The Dog Bites Back: Iselin is so beyond pissed at Edmund after he almost gasses all his guests to death that she, with them supporting him, decide to put him inside the Gas Chamber he used to torture them at gunpoint and kill him with it.
• Downer Ending:
  • "Three Sick Brothers", Erik snaps again on the way back home and sets a gas station on fire, with the implication that this action killed himself and his mother as well.
  • "Bad Writer", The entire plot ends up being a revenge fantasy for Marcus' mother, who hates Olivia, and she seems to kill Olivia in real life, hoping to be able to undo it with her writing, but she can't delete her writing and Olivia ends up dying for real.
  • "The Old School", Sanna makes a ritual that lets the children's ghosts pass to the other side, unfortunately, the town turns out to be right, and the children were truly demons that immediately kill her, her friend and their captor.
• Early-Bird Cameo: All characters that will protagonize a story can be seen in the opening of the show that shows them all in the train.
• Fingore: In order to stop Alex from writing, Olivia writes that his computer became a monster, which prompts it to eat away his fingers, stopping him from writing.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Plenty in "Lab Rats".
    • Edmund mentions the importance of having a proper pocket square. In the end, he realizes that his secretary kept the prototype in his pocket square the whole time when she takes it out sneakily but messes up his pocket square in the process.
    • At one point, it's mentioned that Edmund cares so little about his wife that he needs to be reminded what is her birth date. When the guests lock him up in the gas chamber again, they mention that the password is that exact date, which he then can't guess.
    • It's mentioned that, in 1990, Edmund made a massive move in his company that basically swindled money from investors. It's then revealed that the stealing of the prototype comes from the daughter of one of those victims trying tog et revenge on him.
• Friend to All Children: Sanna is a teacher that loves children, to the point that she is willing to try to save the ghosts of children.
• Gas Chamber: Impatient with his guests that won't reveal who stole the medicine, Edmund traps them in a glass chamber with a few lab rats. And when he gets impatient, he releases a gas that will kill them in 5 minutes.
• Ghost Story: "The Old School" follows a new teacher in a small, reformed school, who quickly finds that the school might be haunted by the ghosts of missing children.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: It took Molly just a short while living away from an urban area and having access to a magical sacrifice altar for her to become progressively unhinged about what or who she was willing to kill. Katja, her daughter, seems to have been influenced by the stone as well in the epilogue, with the implication she killed her father in order to obtain her first million.
• Kill the Ones You Love: The sacrificial stone from "Ultimate Sacrifice" will reward the user the more they loved whatever they killed. Molly finds out that when she killed a rat she found at her home she got much less than what she got from killing the family dog.
• The Sociopath: Edmund in "Lab Rats". He is obsessed with his money that he is willing to torture his guests in order to find out who stole from him by trapping them in a gas chamber. It's also revealed he swindled investors from his money, which led to two committing suicide, which he is very blasé about.
• Red Herring: Molly's neighbors seem extremely suspicious to her. However, while they end up showing her the sacrificial stone, they're harmless and actually warn her against her using it so much, the villain of the story ends up being Molly herself.
• Rewriting Reality: In "Bad Writer", two writing students, Olivia and Alex seem to gain the strange power to write stories that make them actually happen to each other. Then, it seems that another woman is the one actually writing about both of them. In the end, all seemed to be just a story written by Marcus' (Olivia's boyfriend) mother, who seem to hate Olivia.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: "Three Sick Brothers" follows the story of a man who just left a psychiatric ward, and is pushed by his brothers to pick up a girl (Monika) to go on a trip with them. We accompany the story from Erik's point of view, unaware that, none of that was real. Otto and Georg are both figments of his sickness, and so is Monika, who is just a cardboard cutout from a gas station. At the end of the episode, we're shown that he was freaking out all alone in the cabin.
• Villain Protagonist: Molly, in "Ultimate Sacrifice", is a spoiled woman who drove her family in debt in order to live a luxurious life. When they need to move to a smaller, more affordable area, she becomes obsessed with a stone that can grant her money in exchange for sacrifices.
• Unreliable Expositor: Erik and his brothers. Erik's brothers, Otto and Georg, are figments of his imagination, and the story they all tell about Erik killing his father is fake. His father isn't dead, he abandoned Erik.

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