Monster: Lizzie Borden and the Power of a First Female ‘Monster’
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is the fourth season of Netflix’s Monster anthology, a true-crime drama that reimagines infamous killings by centering the psychology, cultural mythmaking, and modern relevance of the accused figure at its core.
Netflix Monster season 4 makes its boldest move yet by turning Lizzie Borden into the franchise’s first woman at the center of the horror. After seasons devoted to Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein, the anthology finally breaks from its male-killer fixation and asks what a female killer anthology story looks like when it is fueled by repression, rage, and desire rather than the usual “lone male predator” template. This is not a minor tweak; it is a creative pivot. Lizzie’s alleged 1892 axe murders of her father and stepmother and the trial that ended in her acquittal become less a forensic puzzle than a study in how a woman is turned into a monster and then into a legend.
From Dahmer to Borden: Why a Female Killer Changes the Game
Monster has always traded on notorious names, but those names have, until now, belonged to men. The first season about Jeffrey Dahmer grew into one of Netflix’s most-watched titles, reaching 1 billion viewing hours within its first 60 days and earning 13 Emmy nominations. The follow-up on Erik and Lyle Menendez drew 11 Emmy nods, while the Ed Gein chapter debuted with 12.2 million views in three days and climbed to No. 1 in 11 countries. That track record proved the appeal of the franchise’s male-centric template.
Monster Lizzie Borden upends that comfort zone. Ella Beatty becomes the first woman to take the central role, following Evan Peters, Cooper Koch, Nicholas Alexander Chavez, and Charlie Hunnam. Her Lizzie is not a faceless executioner; she is a young woman suffocating under the expectations of a wealthy New England household before anyone picks up an axe. By foregrounding female rage and repression, the season rebalances a genre that has long turned women into victims, lovers, or footnotes around male violence. Here, the woman is the axis—and the anthology finally admits that patriarchy can be both the backdrop and the accelerant for a “monster.”
Ryan Murphy’s Sapphic Drama Turns the Case into a Fever Dream
If the franchise’s earlier seasons were obsessed with the mechanics of murder, Monster Lizzie Borden is more intrigued by the erotic and emotional pressure cooker that might precede it. The synopsis makes clear that the new season centers Lizzie’s relationship with Bridget Sullivan, the family maid, a bond described as sapphic and entwined with Lizzie’s hunger to escape family and societal chains. The teaser’s promise of a “sapphic twist” signals that this is not surface-level queer baiting but a deliberate reframing of the legend.
Ryan Murphy’s sapphic drama leans into fantasy as survival strategy: Lizzie and Bridget are said to flee into a world where sex, power, and revenge offer a way out of a house built on humiliation and cruelty. That fantasy curdles into blood, and the show pointedly refuses to be satisfied with rehashing trial transcripts. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story appears less interested in retelling the case than in examining how Lizzie became a cultural myth in the first place. In a genre that often flattens queer women into scandalous rumors, this choice feels overdue—and intentionally provocative.
Ella Beatty’s Lizzie and the Rewriting of a Legend
Casting Ella Beatty as Lizzie is more than a neat bit of Hollywood lineage; it is a signal that Monster wants a performer who can wear both the icon and the uncertainty. According to Netflix’s own materials, Beatty describes the role as a chance to “investigate this complicated person’s psychology” and to dramatize “female rage and repression” that feel strikingly current. That is the thesis of this season: that Lizzie’s story says as much about present-day gender politics as it does about 1892.
Around her, familiar anthology faces return in new skins. Charlie Hunnam, fresh off playing Ed Gein, recasts himself as Andrew Borden, while Vicky Krieps steps in as Bridget, and Rebecca Hall and Billie Lourd inhabit Abby Borden and Emma. By keeping its repertory company but changing the axis to a woman, the show acknowledges its own history of male-centered horror even as it writes a different kind of chapter. The question hovering over every blood-soaked frame—“Is this the blood of the Bordens, Lizzie’s or someone else?”—is less about guilt than about whose story gets to define what the word monster means.
Historical Crime, Contemporary Sensibility, and What Comes Next
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story arrives on Netflix on Sept. 17, as the fourth installment in an Emmy-winning anthology that has built its brand on infamous names. This time, the series is doing more than updating a nursery rhyme about a woman who “took an axe and gave her mother 40 whacks.” It is applying contemporary storytelling sensibilities—queer desire, trauma-informed psychology, and skepticism of patriarchal institutions—to an 1892 crime that has haunted the culture for more than a century.
Rather than centering the mechanics of the murders, the season positions itself around the forces that shaped Lizzie before any blow was struck. Monster has always blurred the line between docudrama and morality play; with this female killer anthology turn, it also blurs the line between period piece and present-day commentary. If the earlier seasons asked how far audiences would go to sit with monstrous men, this one asks a harder question: what happens when the monster looks like a woman whose rage feels uncomfortably familiar?
