There are plenty of horror shows that rely on ghosts, monsters, or masked killers to get under your skin, but one of Netflix’s creepiest series turns something much more familiar into its villain. Red Rose, an eight-episode British horror series with a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score, takes the technology teenagers use every day and asks what would happen if it suddenly started working against them.
Produced by Eleven, the company behind Netflix’s Sex Education, Red Rose puts a sinister twist on the modern teenage experience by showcasing the dark side of growing up online. Across eight episodes, the series mixes familiar horror tropes with social media, smartphones, location tracking, and an app capable of turning its users’ lives upside down. The result is a horror story that feels unsettling precisely because so much of its technology already exists.
What Is ‘Red Rose’ About?
Set near the city of Manchester in England, the miniseries follows a group of recent high school graduates whose plans are interrupted when their friend, Rochelle (Isis Hainsworth), downloads an app called Red Rose. At first, the program resembles spam more than something dangerous, beginning as a random text message sent to potential users from a phone number similar to one in their contacts, but unlucky characters who click the link soon find their lives controlled by the program’s insidious functions. When the app takes over Rochelle’s life and eventually results in her suicide, her best friend, Wren (Amelia Clarkson), downloads Red Rose as well, refusing to believe Rochelle would hurt herself and resolving to get to the bottom of the mysterious app.
Collider Exclusive · Horror Survival Quiz Which Horror Villain Do You Have the Best Chance of Surviving? Jason Voorhees · Michael Myers · Freddy Krueger · Pennywise · Chucky
Five killers. Five completely different ways to die — if you’re not smart enough, fast enough, or self-aware enough to avoid it. Only one of them is the villain your particular set of instincts gives you a fighting chance against. Eight questions will figure out which one.
🏕️Jason
🔪Michael
💤Freddy
🎈Pennywise
🪆Chucky
01
Something feels wrong. You can’t explain it — you just know. What do you do? First instincts are the difference between the survivor and the first act casualty.
02
Where are you most likely to find yourself when things go wrong? Setting is everything in horror. Where you are determines which rules apply.
03
What is your most reliable survival asset? Every survivor has a quality the villain didn’t account for. What’s yours?
04
What kind of fear is hardest for you to fight through? Knowing your weakness is the first step to not dying because of it.
05
You’re with a group when things start going wrong. What’s your role? Horror movies are brutally clear about who survives group situations and who doesn’t.
06
What’s the horror movie mistake you’re most likely to make? Honest self-assessment is a survival skill. Denial is not.
07
What’s your best weapon against something that can’t be stopped by conventional means? Every horror villain has a weakness. The survivors are always the ones who find it.
08
It’s the final scene. You’re the last one standing. How did you make it? The final survivor always has a reason. What’s yours?
Your Survival Odds Have Been Calculated Your Best Chance Is Against…
Your instincts, your strengths, and your particular way of thinking under pressure point to one villain you actually have a fighting chance against. Everyone else — good luck.
Camp Crystal Lake · Friday the 13th
Jason Voorhees
Jason is relentless, but he is also predictable — and that is the gap you would exploit.
He moves in straight lines toward his target. He doesn’t strategise, doesn’t adapt, doesn’t outsmart. He simply pursues.
Your ability to keep moving, use the environment, and resist the panic that freezes most victims gives you a genuine edge.
The Crystal Lake survivors were always the ones who stopped running in circles and started thinking about terrain, water, and distance.
You think like that. Which means Jason, for all his indestructibility, would face someone who simply refused to be where he expected.
Haddonfield, Illinois · Halloween
Michael Myers
Michael watches before he moves. He is patient, methodical, and almost impossible to detect — until it’s too late for anyone who isn’t paying close enough attention.
But you are paying attention. You notice the shape in the window, the car parked slightly wrong, the silence where there should be sound.
Michael’s power lies in the invisibility of ordinary suburbia — the fact that nothing ever looks wrong until it already is.
Your spatial awareness and instinct to map every room, every exit, and every shadow before you need them is precisely the quality Laurie Strode had.
You are not a victim waiting to happen. You are someone who already suspects something is wrong — and acts on it.
Elm Street · A Nightmare on Elm Street
Freddy Krueger
Freddy wins by getting inside your head — using your own fears, your own memories, your own subconscious as weapons against you. That strategy requires a target who can be destabilised.
You are harder to destabilise than most. You’ve faced uncomfortable truths about yourself and you haven’t looked away.
The survivors on Elm Street were always the ones who understood what was happening and chose to face it rather than flee from it.
Freddy’s greatest weakness is that his power evaporates in the presence of someone who refuses to give him the fear he feeds on.
Your psychological resilience — the ability to stay grounded when reality itself becomes unreliable — is exactly the quality that keeps you alive here.
Derry, Maine · It
Pennywise
Pennywise is ancient, shapeshifting, and feeds on terror — but it has one critical vulnerability: it cannot function against someone who genuinely stops being afraid of it.
The Losers Club didn’t survive because they were braver than everyone else. They survived because they faced their fears together, and faced them honestly.
You ask the questions others avoid. You look directly at what frightens you rather than turning away.
That directness — the refusal to let fear fester in the dark — is Pennywise’s worst nightmare.
It chose the wrong target when it chose you. You are exactly the kind of person whose fear tastes like nothing at all.
Chicago · Child’s Play
Chucky
Chucky’s greatest advantage is that nobody takes him seriously until it’s already too late. He exploits the gap between how something looks and what it actually is.
You don’t have that gap. You take threats seriously regardless of how they present — and you never make the mistake of underestimating something because of its size or appearance.
Chucky relies on surprise, on the delay between recognition and response. You close that delay faster than almost anyone.
Your instinct to treat every unfamiliar thing with appropriate scepticism — rather than dismissing it because it seems absurd — is the exact quality that keeps you breathing.
Against Chucky, not laughing is already winning. You are very good at not laughing.
This resolve leads Wren to undergo the same rituals that Red Rose inflicted on Rochelle, resulting in an eerie series of trials that quickly escalate into the same kind of all-out terror that can be found in the world’s most recent horror movies. At first, Red Rose flatters its victims, using filters to show users an enhanced reflection of themselves and treating them to expensive gifts. Rochelle, for instance, receives a glittery dress when she first obeys the system’s wishes by jotting her innermost desires onto her bedroom mirror, but it doesn’t take long for the app to abuse its user’s newfound trust in the system. After Rochelle’s death, Red Rose taunts Wren with her deceased friend’s digital profile, demonstrating just how quickly everyday devices can be turned into instruments of horror.
‘Red Rose’ Depicts the Horrifying Possibilities of Technology in the Digital Era
Red Rose TV ShowImage Via BBC
As Wren and her friends continue investigating the circumstances of Rochelle’s death, Red Rose’s exploitation of its digital domain only worsens, and it’s through this technological brand of suspense that Red Rose produces its own unique horror. Throughout the self-proclaimed Dickheads’ attempts to retrace Rochelle’s online footsteps, members of the group are subjected to various torments, with Wren in particular almost killed by her stepfather, Simon (Rob Hallett), after Red Rose plants child abuse onto his laptop to blackmail him. Wren’s remaining friends are subsequently stalked both digitally and in person, and the ever-practical Ashley (Natalie Blair) is even hospitalized after Red Rose uses her location to push her off a cliff.
As a result, what makes Red Rose feel so scary is the ever-present power of its digital antagonist, a villainous organization whose lofty, poetic persona is grounded in a familiar apparatus. Unlike other horror shows that imagine the future dangers of modern technology, such as Charlie Brooker’sBlack Mirror, Red Rose never veers too far into the speculative, instead opting to torture its characters through methods which feel startlingly realistic. Between the app’s use of editing software to digitally haunt Rochelle with audio and video of her deceased mother and Red Rose’s ability to seemingly access cameras anywhere, the miniseries is at its most creative when uncovering just how much horrifying potential exists in present-day devices.
‘Red Rose’ Represents the Social Terror of Being a Modern Teenager
Red Rose’s manipulation of modern technology to torture its main characters isn’t used solely for sadistic traps, however, as early episodes in the miniseries also showcase how the villainous app can take advantage of social media to isolate its victims. After receiving the dress she needed to attend a party, Red Rose blackmails Rochelle into kissing Wren’s boyfriend, Noah (Harry Redding), and uploads fake posts about the incident in the aftermath. Likewise, after Rochelle’s death, the app again accesses the functions of Wren’s phone to upload posts that make her look insensitive, effectively turning her into her hometown’s pariah and illustrating how technology can exacerbate the dark side of teenage relationships.
Red Rose’s capacity for interfering with the normal teenage experience is demonstrated further as the series progresses. During Episode 3, for instance, one of the sweetest members of the Dickheads, Anthony (Ellis Howard), finds himself haunted by a potential digital stalker while navigating a gay dating app in a relatable moment of underrepresented LGBTQ+ terror in a Netflix series. Later, after the group enlists the help of hacker Jaya (Ashna Rabheru), the Dickheads uncover the truth behind Red Rose’s origins and the story of the app’s founder, Adam Taylor (Charlie Hiscock). A high school student desperately obsessed with his classmate, Taylor’s tragedy is one you’ll have to witness for yourself to understand Red Rose’s main themes, but it’s safe to say this boy never heard of personal boundaries.
Thankfully, the miniseries really kicks into gear when the Dickheads do battle against Red Rose’s current leader, the mysterious online entity known only as The Gardener, and the episodes leading up to the show’s final confrontation should more than satisfy fans of the horror genre. While the miniseries’ realistic premise does at times restrict its fear factor, forcing Red Rose to rely on indirect methods of terror in its early episodes that don’t always hit as hard as they could, the show’s ending still delivers on the violence of its rhetoric.
Moreover, by balancing its thrills with a story that raises awareness about the ongoing struggle against online abuse in the world today, Red Rose uses its digital drama to tell an important and terrifying story. Years after its release, its vision of technology turning against the people who depend on it may feel even more unsettling than it did before.
Red Rose is available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.
