A Female ‘Monster’ Changes What This Anthology Can Be
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is the fourth season of Netflix’s anthology series about so-called monstrous figures, and the first to center on a woman accused of murder, reimagining the 1892 Borden case as a feminist, darkly comic true crime drama that blends period detail with psychological character study.
The core shift is simple but overdue: Monster Lizzie Borden Netflix moves the franchise from male serial killers to a woman whose guilt was never proven. After seasons on Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein, the series now asks what monstrosity looks like when filtered through female rage, social repression, and the legal fantasy that women are too delicate to wield an axe. That is more than a casting change; it rewires the show’s moral engine. Instead of staring at male predation, Monster is about to interrogate the conditions that can turn a repressed daughter into a cultural myth—and why audiences keep insisting she pick up the weapon.
Ella Beatty’s Breakout and a Killer Supporting Cast
The season’s risk starts with its lead. Ella Beatty actress status jumps from supporting player to front-and-center antihero as Lizzie, the wealthy New England daughter accused of hacking her father and stepmother to death in 1892. She is not inheriting a simple villain; she is inheriting a cultural nursery rhyme and more than a century of speculation. Beatty has called it a chance to explore "female rage and repression" and a crime that feels "mythic in proportion," a mission statement for the season’s ambitions.
Around her, the Netflix anthology series leans on star power to ground the chaos. Charlie Hunnam appears as Andrew Borden, returning to the franchise after playing Ed Gein, while Rebecca Hall plays stepmother Abby, and Vicky Krieps is the maid Bridget Sullivan. Sarah Paulson’s arrival as Aileen Wuornos, another infamous killer, signals that Monster now operates as a loose criminal universe rather than isolated case files. That casting web makes the anthology feel less like a rotating freak show and more like an evolving conversation about who gets branded monstrous—and why.
From Grim True Crime to Darkly Comic Period Drama
Monster began as a grim true crime drama, but this season looks determined to break that mold. The Lizzie Borden chapter is explicitly described as a bold, darkly comic new direction, framed by some of the cast as “Ryan Murphy does Cinderella.” Instead of oppressively realist dread, we are promised fantasy, sex, power, and revenge within a house "built on humiliation and cruelty," where Lizzie and her maid retreat into a fever dream of liberation.
That tonal pivot matters. By treating the era like a twisted fairy tale—complete with modern needle drops from artists such as Kate Bush and Wet Leg—the show stops pretending these are neutral recreations and admits they are interpretations. The season leans into the theory that Lizzie and Bridget were lovers whose relationship fuels the violence, making queerness and patriarchy as central as the murders themselves. In doing so, Monster Lizzie Borden Netflix stops being a reconstruction of a crime scene and becomes a story about who has the power to rewrite their narrative when history refuses to decide what happened.
A Historic Case Reframed Through Feminist Eyes
The real Lizzie Borden was accused of killing Andrew and Abby Borden in their Fall River home, then sensationally acquitted after a trial where some doubted a woman could physically commit such a brutal act. Monster uses that gap between horror and disbelief as its thesis. Co-creator Ian Brennan has pointed to the era’s view that women were almost a different species, too weak to even lift an axe—a prejudice that arguably helped set Lizzie free.
By centering Lizzie’s psychology and her suffocating domestic life, the series repositions the case as a story about structural cruelty, not only individual pathology. The official synopsis describes an “icon who refuses to live imprisoned in a cage,” a loaded phrase that blurs the line between empowerment and horror. This is the most provocative move the Netflix anthology series has attempted: suggesting that the same society that fears a female monster also manufactures her, then profits from retelling her legend again and again.
Why This Season Could Redefine ‘Monster’
All eight episodes of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story arrive on Netflix on September 17, 2026, marking the franchise’s clearest turning point yet. For the first time, Monster is not satisfied with reenacting notorious crimes; it wants to interrogate the gendered assumptions that shaped them, and to smuggle a darkly comic, almost camp sensibility into the buttoned-up world of Victorian Fall River.
If this season works, Monster stops being a revolving door of male predators and becomes a more flexible true crime drama anthology—one that can stretch across period drama, queer romance, and social satire without losing its teeth. If it fails, it will be because the show flinched at its own premise and turned feminist fury into quirky aesthetic. Either way, The Lizzie Borden Story signals a franchise ready to risk its formula. That alone makes this first female-led outing the most important chapter Monster has attempted so far.
