The ending of Infested is deeply cathartic for arachnophobes everywhere

I'm sure most of us have at least one scary story involving spiders, some more severe than others, but I doubt anyone's compares to the terrifying infestation faced by the characters in Sébastien Vanicek's newly released Shudder film Infested (or Vermines in French).

Starting with a guy named Kaleb who brings an exotic and poisonous spider home to join his collection of other insects, arachnids, and various creepy-crawlies, Kaleb makes the mistake of leaving his newfound "pet" inside a damp shoebox. It doesn't take long for the spider to crawl out through a hole and lay eggs, thus beginning the horrific infestation that will soon take the lives of almost everyone in the apartment building.

SPOILERS ahead for Infested

Whether you couldn't stomach the movie and needed to tap out but still want to know what happened in the end, or you just have questions about the Infested ending, our explainer will help break things down for you!

Who survives the infestation?

Ultimately, the only characters who make it out alive from the apartment building are Kaleb, his sister Manon, and their friend Lila. Their other two friends Jordy and Mathys are killed by the spiders.

In the climactic showdown at the end, the survivors are taken to the parking garage after getting taken hostage by the police, who prove to be almost more of a nuisance than the spiders in this film. Mathys sacrifices himself for the others by opening the doors and unleashing the spiders into the garage to attack the police and distract them so his friends can escape.

The remaining group eventually breaks free of their bindings and make it to a car where they come face-to-face with the largest spider yet. Luckily, it doesn't attack them and they make it out alive.

If you can't beat the spiders, blow the whole apartment building up

When all is said and done, there's no real way for the city to deal with the apartment building other than to blow it up. I mean no one's going to live there now, the spiders have won. If you've ever been terrified by a spider in your own home then I'm sure you've considered, even jokingly, burning the place down or surrendering a room in the house to spider in question.

Well, Infested plays up several of those tropes in the movie. At one point the characters duck tape a bathroom door shut to keep the spiders contained. It doesn't work. Then at the very end, after the survivors have escaped, we see the apartment building crumble as the entire place is torn down. Arachnophobes everywhere rejoiced.

In the final moments of the movie, Kaleb is seen in the woods burying a shoe box containing the childhood photograph of himself and Jordy to commemorate their friendship and their dream of opening a reptile center. We also see Kaleb pick up a spider crawling nearby him, meaning that even after everything that happened in his apartment, his sense of curiosity for arachnids is still somehow intact. Let's just hope he leaves this one where he found it.

Infested is now streaming on Shudder.

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