Bloodride Season 1, Episode 1 recap: What is the ultimate sacrifice?

Netflix’s latest horror anthology, Bloodride, begins with a woman desperate to get out of her new home by any means necessary, including making a bloody sacrifice.

Bloodride is a new Norweigian horror anthology series that debuted on Netflix just in time for people to bunker down in quarantine. It assembles a group of six unique characters, all covered in various blood-splatter, as they gather on a creepy spectral bus to…somewhere.

The first episode, titled “Ultimate Sacrifice,” is about a woman named Molly who is forced to relocate to a rural small town area straight out of Pet Sematary.

Condensed into thirty minutes is a short story following Molly’s downward spiral into killing animals. Upon arriving in the strange new place, she laments, leaving the city behind. Her husband reassures her that they can return to the city someday, as in, not until six years later, at least.

Molly isn’t pleased by that, and it quickly becomes apparent that she’s desperate to do whatever it takes to get the money they need to go back to wherever it is they came from. The background of these characters is all left very vague.

While on a jog, Molly notices two of her creepy neighbors in the woods. She witnesses one of the women kill her cat, which is odd since everyone in the town seems strangely attached to their animals.

The two women tell Molly that it is a custom in their town to kill living things on that rock, as it is a sacrificial rock leftover from the Vikings era. If you kill an animal on it, you win money.

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Molly tests their theory with a rat and only wins 50 kronor on a scratcher. Angrily, she approaches the women again to tell them this. They tell her that the amount of money you earn is equivalent to your connection with the creature. A rat she already wanted to get rid of after finding it in her basement, wouldn’t be worth much.

So Molly goes to the rock again, this time with her family dog, Bolt. Poor Bolt. What struck me most is that Molly hardly needed any incentive to kill the dog, or even the rat, for that matter. She has an innate cruel streak to be so easily motivated into killing things on a “sacrificial rock” without even questioning the women who gave her the information.

Still, Bolt’s death only gives her 3,500 kronor, which is still less than she wants. The two women make her realize she didn’t necessarily love Bolt, at least not as much as her daughter.

Eventually, Molly coaxes her husband to follow her out into the woods so she can show him the rock and Bolt’s corpse. He thinks she’s gone mad, as any normal person would.

Molly attempts to murder her husband on the rock (but honestly, does that women genuinely love anyone?) Before she can finish the job, she’s interrupted by her daughter, who overheard her admission back at the house. She winds up, killing her mother.

The ending sequence is spliced together between the final scene in the woods and a moment in the future where an unseen woman is running a multi-million dollar company. The ending “twist” is that it’s Molly’s daughter who became a millionaire after her mother died on the rock.

A man comes into her office to interview her. He notes that her father also mysteriously disappeared a few years later, indicating that she hasn’t stopped killing people, and in her lap is a content white cat who will likely meet its untimely demise in the near future.

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What did you think about the first episode of Bloodride? Were you surprised by the ending? Do you plan on continuing the season? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

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