Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story: The schoolyard rhyme has been following Lizzie Borden around for over a century. “Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks / When she saw what she had done / She gave her father forty-one.” It’s catchy and grisly and historically inaccurate—the actual number of blows was far fewer, though no less brutal—but it’s managed to keep Borden’s name alive in the American imagination long after the details of the case faded from memory. The rhyme doesn’t care about nuance. It doesn’t care that Borden was acquitted, that the evidence against her was largely circumstantial, that the trial was a media sensation that divided the country. It just wants you to remember the axe.
Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster anthology is betting that the truth behind the rhyme is more disturbing than the playground version. The fourth installment of the hit Netflix series, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, will premiere globally on September 17. The first official images and poster have arrived, along with details about a cast that suggests this season is aiming for something stranger and more psychologically complex than a straightforward true crime recounting.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story – The First Woman Monster
Ella Beatty stars as Lizzie Borden, and the first image released shows her covered in blood. Whose blood, exactly, is a question the marketing is happy to leave unanswered. Beatty, who previously appeared in Murphy’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans and the Oscar-nominated Sundance sensation If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, is the first woman to anchor a season of the anthology. The choice is significant, and Beatty’s statement about the role suggests she understands the weight of what she’s stepping into.
“I am so excited for viewers to experience our exploration of Lizzie Borden’s story and the questions that her life animates to this day,” Beatty told Netflix’s Tudum. “It has been a dream come true to investigate this complicated person’s psychology and to examine an American crime that feels almost mythic in proportion. This season gives us our first female Monster and delves into female rage and repression, which I’ve found to feel strikingly relevant.”
That last phrase—”female rage and repression”—is the key to understanding what Murphy and Brennan seem to be doing with this installment. The previous seasons of Monster have examined men whose violence was, in different ways, tied to their relationships with their own desires. Jeffrey Dahmer’s loneliness curdled into predation. The Menéndez brothers’ fear and resentment of their father exploded into murder. Ed Gein’s pathology was rooted in a relationship with his mother, so twisted it inspired Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs. Lizzie Borden represents something different. She’s a woman who, if the prosecution’s theory were correct, responded to the constraints of her life with an axe.
The official synopsis leans into that reading. “When the repressed daughter of a wealthy New England family and her rebellious maid find themselves trapped in a house built on humiliation and cruelty, they escape into a fantasy of sex, power, and revenge. The gruesome unsolved murders that follow don’t just shock the world—they give birth to an icon who refuses to live imprisoned in a cage, choosing instead to forge her own legend: shocking, monstrous, and gloriously free.”
That’s a lot to pack into a logline. The implication that Borden and the family maid, played by Vicky Krieps, develop some kind of intimate bond that fuels the violence is a narrative choice that will likely generate discussion among true crime purists. There’s no historical consensus on Borden’s sexuality, though speculation has been part of her story for decades. The series appears to be leaning into that ambiguity and building something fictional from it—a fantasy of escape that becomes a blueprint for murder.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story – The Cast
The ensemble Murphy and Brennan have assembled is substantial. Charlie Hunnam plays Lizzie’s father, Andrew Borden, the wealthy but miserly patriarch whose brutal death is the center of the historical case. Hunnam is coming off his own Monster appearance in the Ed Gein season, which earned him an Emmy nomination, and his return for the fourth installment suggests Murphy likes what he brings to this universe.
Rebecca Hall plays Lizzie’s stepmother, Abby Borden, the other victim of the Fall River murders. Hall has described the series in terms that suggest a tone more heightened than the previous seasons: “It’s like Ryan Murphy directed Cinderella.” The fairy tale reference, applied to a story about an axe murderer, is exactly the kind of dissonance Murphy has built his career on.
Billie Lourd, a Murphy regular, plays Lizzie’s sister Emma. Jessica Barden appears as Lizzie’s best friend. Vicky Krieps, fresh off a string of acclaimed performances in films like Phantom Thread and Corsage, plays the family maid—a character the synopsis positions as central to whatever relationship drives the story’s turn toward violence.
Then there’s Sarah Paulson, making a special appearance as Aileen Wuornos, the serial killer whose story was told in the film Monster (for which Charlize Theron won an Oscar). The inclusion of Wuornos in a story set decades before her own killing spree is the kind of audacious, timeline-bending move Murphy has used before. It suggests the series may be building connections between its various killers, constructing a larger argument about violence, gender, and the American imagination. Paulson has been a Murphy collaborator for years, and her casting in this role—a killer playing a killer—adds a layer of meta-commentary that’s hard to ignore.
The Big Question
Brennan has said that the central question driving the entire Monster anthology—”Are monsters born or made?”—will be central to this season as well. In Borden’s case, the question has always been complicated by the lack of a definitive answer. She was acquitted. The murders were never officially solved. She lived the rest of her life in Fall River, a free woman, ostracized by the community but never legally punished.
What the series seems to be doing is less a forensic examination of the evidence and more a psychological portrait of a woman pushed to the breaking point. The synopsis describes a house “built on humiliation and cruelty.” Andrew Borden was notoriously controlling and tight-fisted, a man whose wealth was considerable but whose willingness to spend it on his family was minimal. The household was tense, claustrophobic, defined by rules that Lizzie, as an unmarried woman in her thirties still living under her father’s roof, had no power to change.
The series appears to be asking what happens when a person trapped in that kind of environment finally snaps. Not in the lurid, exploitative sense, but as a genuine inquiry into the circumstances that might turn someone into the figure the schoolyard rhyme remembers. Lizzie Borden as an icon—”shocking, monstrous, and gloriously free”—is a construction. The woman behind it remains, after all these years, stubbornly unknowable.
The Franchise Context
The Monster anthology has become one of Netflix’s most reliable performers. The first season, DAHMER, reached a billion view hours in its first sixty days and currently ranks sixth on the all-time English TV Top 10. The Menéndez brothers’ season earned eleven Emmy nominations. The Ed Gein season, released to strong numbers, earned seven nominations, including recognition for Hunnam and Laurie Metcalf, who played his mother.
Each season has taken a different approach to its subject. DAHMER was sprawling and sociological, interested as much in the systemic failures that allowed its killer to operate as in the killer himself. The Menéndez Brothers was claustrophobic and familial, a story about what happens when violence begets violence within a single household. Ed Gein was gothic and psychological, examining the formation of a mind that would inspire decades of horror fiction.
The Lizzie Borden Story, based on the synopsis and the casting, appears to be taking a more expressionistic approach. The language of fantasy, the comparison to Cinderella, the presence of a historical serial killer as a kind of spirit guide—these suggest a season less interested in the evidentiary details of the case than in the myth that grew up around it. Lizzie Borden has been a folk song, a ballet, an opera, multiple films, a television miniseries starring Christina Ricci, and an independent horror film released just this year. The facts of the case have been picked over for over a century. What Murphy and Brennan seem to be offering is not another reconstruction but an interpretation—a version of Lizzie Borden that speaks to the questions Beatty raised about female rage and repression, about what happens when a woman refuses to live imprisoned in a cage.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Release Date
September 17, 2026, is the date. The axe is waiting. The rhyme has been stuck in our heads for a hundred and thirty years. The series is about to give it a new verse.