General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Bloodride

Bloodride (Norwegian: Blodtur) is a Norwegian-language horror anthology television series produced for Netflix, in which six self-contained tales of terror are linked by a frame story of doomed passengers riding a spectral bus toward an unknown destination. It was announced by Netflix at the Berlinale on 13 February 2019 as a production of the Norwegian company Monster Scripted, and was released on 13 March 2020 as a single season of six episodes of roughly half an hour each.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Blodtur (Norwegian)³
Format	Six standalone episodes of 27 to 32 minutes, framed by a spectral bus whose passengers star in each story²
Announced	13 February 2019, at the Berlinale¹
Released	13 March 2020, on Netflix⁴
Creators	Kjetil Indregard and Atle Knudsen; Geir Henning Hopland also directed⁴
Production	Monster Scripted, Oslo; part of the Nordic Entertainment Group (NENT)¹
Reception	IMDb 6.4/10 from about 5,000 votes; Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer 62%⁵^•⁴

Spoilers

Format and episodes

Each episode opens the same way: a pale bus driver enters his vehicle on a rainy night, and the doomed passengers aboard the spectral bus are introduced. As the bus stops, one passenger exits and becomes the protagonist of that episode's self-contained story, with a small clue about what has happened to them. The bus sequence acts as the anthology's wraparound, though the show never explains why the passengers are aboard; one reviewer read it as the characters traveling to purgatory.⁸ Aside from this frame, nothing in plot or character binds the episodes together.⁷

The six episodes, with Netflix's own descriptions, are:²

Ultimate Sacrifice (31 min): city dweller Molly adjusts to a downsized life in the country, until she learns why her neighbors are so attached to their pets.
Three Sick Brothers (27 min): after three years in a psychiatric hospital, Erik drives to his family's cabin with his brothers, and trouble starts when they pick up a hitchhiker.
Bad Writer (27 min): the privileged Olivia joins a writing class, but her instructor and an awkward fellow student have her questioning reality.
Lab Rats (32 min): a pharmaceutical titan humiliates his dinner guests, including his wife, when he discovers one of them has stolen a valuable prototype.
The Old School (28 min): idealistic teacher Sanna moves to a country school reopening after 40 years, where a mysterious tragedy reaches out to her from beyond the grave.
The Elephant in the Room (27 min): at a wild holiday office party, two new employees investigate a coworker's grisly plunge from the roof.

The cast includes Ine Marie Wilmann, Bjørnar Teigen, Emma Spetalen Magnusson, Benjamin Helstad, Dagny Backer Johnsen, and Stig Amdam.²

Development and production

Netflix announced the series at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2019, the year Norway was the festival's country in focus. The press release described it as a "tongue-in-cheek horror anthology series, where each story is set in its own realistic, yet weird universe", with six tales to be shot in Norway during 2019.¹

The creative team. Kjetil Indregard, writer of the Norwegian series Maniac, developed the show with director Atle Knudsen, a veteran of the horror-tinged Norwegian series ZombieLars, and the creative team at Monster Scripted: Bård Fjulsrud, Håkon Briseid, and Ida Håndlykken Kvernstrøm. Geir Henning Hopland, a director of Lilyhammer, joined as co-director.¹^•⁶ Monster Scripted, one of the largest TV-drama producers in Norway, had previously produced Borderliner, Nobel, and The Half Brother.¹

Indregard cited 1980s television as the model: the Roald Dahl-based Tales of the Unexpected and The Twilight Zone. He argued that this genre had so far been absent from Norwegian productions.⁷

Norwegian setting and identity

Three of the six episodes take place in rural Norway, and the settings across the season include a summer cabin in a forest, a small village in what the landscape suggests is the north-west of the country, and the affluent urban neighborhoods and business skyline of Oslo. A scholarly study of Netflix originals and regional identity notes that the rural stories tap to some extent into Norwegian mythology and cultural identity, but that in plot and character types there is very little that is nationally specific about the series. The spoken dialects are close to the standardized diction of Oslo and its surroundings.⁷

The same study places Bloodride among Netflix Norwegian titles such as Home for Christmas and Post Mortem: Nobody Dies in Skarnes that read as "exotically local" to international audiences while feeling generic to Norwegians. The Norwegian tabloid VG gave the series 3 on a six-point dice scale, calling it "not really worth rewatching".⁷

Reception

Critical response was mixed. The Review Geek scored the season 7/10, praising the twist-driven scripts, dark humor, and foreshadowing that reward repeat viewing, and naming Ultimate Sacrifice, Bad Writer, and Lab Rats as standouts while calling The Elephant in the Room the weakest episode.⁸ The Danish site Heaven of Horror found the first three episodes the strongest and judged the series uneven as horror, with some episodes playing more as thriller or drama.⁹ NME called the series "Black Mirror for technophiles" and praised its tight, twisty half-hour scripts, while noting it was compared often to The Twilight Zone and Inside No. 9.¹⁰

Aggregated measures sit in the middle range: IMDb records 6.4/10 from about 5,000 votes, and Rotten Tomatoes lists a 62% Tomatometer.⁵^•⁴ The series remains available on Netflix as a single season.³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Genre web series: horror, thriller, science fiction, and mystery

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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