American Horror Stories Season 3: Tapeworm Ending Explained

The American Horror Stories “Tapeworm” episode is season 3’s introduction to body horror. This David Cronenberg-esque episode of American Horror Stories season 3 examines the modern-day drive to be the best through the eyes of aspiring model Vivian Lee Finch (Laura Kariuki), whose hunger for success takes her to New York City in the hope of landing on the cover of Vogue magazine. When she visits the notoriously picky Sheila Klein’s modeling agency looking for representation, they dismiss her as overweight at a size 4. She becomes desperate to lose pounds so she can get signed.

A doctor suggests a non-conventional approach – a tapeworm. Vivian willingly ingests the larvae, and as the organism grows inside her, she sheds pounds and appears in glamorous magazines, but the tapeworm’s appetite is insatiable. Fearing for her life, she takes a substance that will force it out of her body, but because she let it grow too large, it kills her in the process. Heather discovers the gruesome scene and becomes the tapeworm’s next victim, later appearing at Sheila Klein’s office looking visibly thinner.

The Tapeworm’s Final Victim

Heather’s Doom Explained

At one point, Vivian tries to explain the tapeworm’s hunger to Heather. However, she gets rebuffed and told the “tapeworm” is her jealousy and massively inflated ego running rampant. This denial sets Heather up to remain ignorant of the tapeworm’s real danger when she enters their shared apartment and discovers Vivian’s body in the bathtub. The tapeworm is dangling behind Heather’s head, and in the following scene, she’s seen sprawled on the floor of the hallway with the tapeworm’s body coiled around her neck and its head lunging into her mouth.

Unfortunately, Heather didn’t have the same Faustian choice that Vivian did when ingesting the tapeworm and, therefore, had even less chance of controlling it. At least the doctor warns Vivian about overfeeding the tapeworm, but Heather has no explanation and is in even greater peril. She did tell Vivian that every aspiring model, including herself, has the same drive to succeed. They just “hide it better,” so, in a way, Heather is getting her comeuppance after all.

Vivian’s Death & Tapeworm Reveal Explained

The Tapeworm Is Worse Than Vivian Expected

Despite her doctor’s strict instructions, Vivian doesn’t adhere to a regular eating schedule and instead allows the tapeworm to dictate the size of her meals. Not only does she eat outside of mealtime, but she eats whenever she’s not working and devours the food at the craft service table. Vivian has a choice: either remove the worm herself, or she could die. Unfortunately, it’s much worse than either the doctor or Vivian could have predicted, and when she uses a toxin to drive it out of her lower orifice, it’s strong enough to fight back.

While real tapeworms don’t have the sort of mouth that the one in American Horror Stories does, the needle-like teeth and expanding jaws make for a terrifying creature. Even after Vivian grabs its head and pulls its body out of her (at this point, it’s several feet long), it behaves like a snake and mauls her to death. When Heather finds her and the blood-splattered wall next to the bathtub, it’s clear that not only did it viciously attack her, but the tapeworm might have fed on her flesh as well.

Why Vivian Accepted The Tapeworm & Couldn’t Stop Feeding It

Vivian Doomed Herself Thanks To Her Narrow-Focused Drive

Vivian was so desperate to prove she could overcome her limitations and become a model that she accepted the tapeworm without considering the ramifications. Her need for validation was so strong that she never asked about the consequences of having the tapeworm inside of her long-term. Vivian didn’t try to curb the tapeworm’s hunger even when it turned her into a monstrous person because it led to bigger jobs. She only considered the dangerous side effects to her career when she lost so much weight that designers got fed up with constantly making time-consuming alterations after fittings.

The tapeworm embodies Vivian’s internal hunger for success hidden behind a starry-eyed veneer. When the episode begins, Vivian is smiling, happy, and eager. By the end of the episode, she is sullen, angry, and bitter, a metamorphosis symbolic of her time spent in the modeling industry and the effects of the tapeworm as it takes over her body. Vivian can’t stop feeding the tapeworm because she thinks she will lose her foothold as a supermodel when she should have been worried about losing the aspects of herself that made her a good person.

The Real Meaning Of The Tapeworm In American Horror Stories

The Expectations Put On Those In The Fashion Industry Are Dangerous

This episode of American Horror Stories drives home the concept that the fashion industry is cutthroat and cultivates a toxic culture of getting ahead by any means necessary. Even though Vivian and Heather start as friends who vow to help each other get to the top, Vivian changes into an ambitious and self-centered narcissist once the tapeworm is introduced. Despite having scoliosis, she initially set out to become a supermodel. However, she only reinforces the poor behavior that makes the fashion industry so dangerous for impressionable young people, and even good-hearted Heather isn’t immune to the perspective.

As the doctor points out to Vivian, after the first signs the tapeworm has gotten out of control, the organism’s defense mechanism becomes her defense mechanism. While it eats to live and starves her of the nutrients she needs to survive, she takes every job for herself, insulting other models and calling Heather a washed-up has-been. Instead of being the best version of herself, she chooses to act superior to everyone around her, sacrificing altruism for fame, success, and notoriety for an industry that devours her in one of the best episodes of American Horror Stories yet.

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How The Tapeworm Ending Compares To Other American Horror Stories Episodes

It’s Similar To One Season 3 Episode

What American Horror Stories does, in many cases, is to present morality tales and grim depictions of what happens to people who make the wrong choices in life. That is exactly what happened in “Tapeworm,” as it shows a woman doing bad things to her body and to those around her to find success. The tapeworm itself is a metaphor for how it ate up what was good inside her, and when it was finished, it discarded Vivian and threw her away. It is also an interesting contrast to the horrors of the world of supermodels.

This is similar to the ending of “Organ,” the fourth episode of the season, which sees a womanizer named Toby who pays for his selfish ways by having women eventually capture him and use him to harvest his organs to help women live longer. This is a similar ending to “Tapeworm” in that a person thinks they can do anything to get what they want, and in the end, it destroys them, in both cases, physically and mentally.

However, this is only one form of the typical American Horror Stories endings, and the other two episodes of season 3 (“Bestie” and “Daphne”) present something entirely different. In both of those cases, the horrors happen to mostly innocent people. In one, a teenager, depressed and downtrodden after her mother dies, meets someone online who manipulates her into doing bad things, while in the other, a man gets a high-tech assistant who turns evil. In both cases, the endings have dark twists, like “Tapeworm,” but remain more tragic because of the victims.

American Horror Stories

The creators of American Horror Story reunite to launch American Horror Stories, a horror anthology series created for FX and Hulu. Centering on a new, unique horror story each episode, AHS follows various new characters through each episode as they experience their own terrifying tales, often including the supernatural.

Cast

Sierra McCormick , Paris Jackson , Merrin Dungey , Matt Bomer , Naomi Grossman , John Carroll Lynch , Charles Melton , Billie Lourd

Release Date

July 15, 2021

Seasons

3

Writers

Manny Coto , Brad Falchuck

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