A New Monster, A New Lizzie
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is a new season of Netflix’s Monster anthology series that revisits the infamous 1892 axe murders through a stylised true crime adaptation focused on psychology, repression and female rage rather than a dry historical reenactment.
The key takeaway is clear: this is less a courtroom recap and more a thesis on how a legend is born. Netflix has cast Ella Beatty as Lizzie Borden, presenting her blood-splashed and staring straight at the viewer, declaring that this story is about interior life as much as exterior violence. The season arrives September 17, positioning Lizzie Borden Netflix content as prestige drama, not background binge. In a landscape saturated with true crime, Monster is betting that reframing a mythic case through one young actor’s breakout role can still feel urgent.
Ella Beatty Drama and the First Female Monster
Casting Ella Beatty as the titular Borden is the season’s loudest creative statement. Netflix describes her selection as the result of an extensive search, and Monster gives the rising star her biggest role to date. She steps into a part haunted by earlier interpretations, yet the early images and her own comments suggest a different ambition: not whether Lizzie swung the axe, but who Lizzie believed herself to be.
Beatty has called the case “almost mythic in proportion” and framed the show as an examination of “female rage and repression”. That matters. This is the anthology’s first season centred on a woman, and Monster is explicitly asking what happens when a franchise built on male brutality turns its lens on a controlled daughter in a cruel household. The result looks like an Ella Beatty drama that treats Lizzie less as a ghost story and more as a contested, uncomfortable feminist anti-hero.
Reframing an 1892 Murder as Intimate Horror
Lizzie Borden’s case is familiar: accused of killing her father and stepmother with an axe in their Massachusetts home in 1892, acquitted a year later, and never replaced by another suspect. What makes this Lizzie Borden Netflix retelling notable is how firmly it rejects the dusty-whodunit angle. The series “looks intent on crawling inside her head,” reframing the crime through desire, humiliation and the simmering fury inside the Borden home.
Netflix’s outline paints Lizzie as the controlled daughter of a wealthy family, trapped with rebellious maid Bridget Sullivan as they share fantasies of sex, power and revenge before the murders that shock the world. This is an unapologetically subjective true crime adaptation: the show is interested in how Lizzie changed what the world believed a killer could be, not in resolving an officially unsolved file. That choice pushes Monster toward gothic psychological horror more than procedural mystery.
The Monster Anthology Series Expands Its Past
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is the fourth season of the true crime adaptation created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, following chapters on Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers and Ed Gein. This time, the anthology turns to a crime kept alive by more than a century of theories, pop culture retellings and a schoolyard rhyme that exaggerated the number of blows.
The casting underlines how self-referential the Monster anthology series has become. Charlie Hunnam, who previously played Ed Gein, returns as Andrew Borden, now on the receiving end of the blade. Vicky Krieps, Rebecca Hall, Billie Lourd and Jessica Barden round out a period ensemble that leans into the Bordens’ ornate yet suffocating world. By revisiting another infamous historical crime, the show continues to turn real cases into ongoing, interconnected lore—an uneasy but intentional strategy that folds true crime history into a single, stylised universe.
Why Lizzie Still Matters—and Where Monster Goes Next
Over a century later, Lizzie Borden remains an unresolved Rorschach test. Her acquittal, the unsolved nature of the murders and that morbid children’s rhyme have kept her story in perpetual circulation. Previous films and television projects—from a 1970s telefilm to a 2018 feature—have tried to claim her, often linking the killings to suffocating domestic life. Monster enters this crowded field with a clear thesis: Lizzie is less a question of guilt than a symbol of how we imagine women’s capacity for violence.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story premieres September 17 on Netflix, promising to trace how a repressed daughter became a notorious public figure and, in the show’s own words, “something larger than the crime itself”. If the season succeeds, it will not be because it finally answers what happened in 1892, but because it convinces viewers that the way we tell Lizzie’s story says as much about us as it does about her.
