From True Crime Curiosity to Sapphic Fury
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is a new entry in Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster anthology series that reinterprets the infamous 1892 hatchet murders as a stylized sapphic thriller drama about female rage, repressed desire, and the claustrophobic violence of a wealthy household rather than a neutral true-crime reenactment. This is not a history lesson; it is a deliberate provocation. After four years of controversy around previous seasons that dramatized killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein, and were condemned by people connected to those cases as exploitative, Murphy’s pivot to Lizzie Borden feels strategic and thematic. Everyone in this case is long dead, but the emotions he foregrounds—resentment, humiliation, fantasy, bloodlust—are pointedly alive. Monster returns on September 17 with eight episodes that promise to treat Lizzie not as a cold file, but as a myth remixed through queer, furious eyes.
Blood, Desire, and the Queering of a Folk Villain
The trailer announces its intent with a mantra: “There’s nothing wrong with blood. Blood is power. Blood is freedom.” That line alone signals how the Lizzie Borden Monster series is reframing the murders—as liberation through violence rather than only moral transgression. Soundtracked by Rosalía’s “Berghain,” the footage leans into pop sensuality and queer longing, foregrounding the theory that Andrew Borden abused Lizzie and that she was in a sexual relationship with the family maid, Bridget “Maggie” Sullivan, who may have helped execute the killings. The images of corseted bodies, stolen glances, and an axe glinting in soft light turn the house into both prison and playground. Instead of obsessing over evidence and alibis, the sapphic thriller drama lingers on what it feels like when forbidden desire collides with patriarchal cruelty. The folk rhyme about “forty whacks” becomes less a punchline and more a war cry.
Monster’s Dark Style Meets Female Psychology
Ryan Murphy true crime has always been less about careful reconstruction and more about mood, excess, and psychology, and Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story extends that approach into a distinctly feminist register. Ella Beatty’s Lizzie and Vicky Krieps’ Bridget are trapped inside a New England home built on “cruelty, repression and humiliation,” where their escape route is a fantasy of sex, power, and revenge. Beatty has said that every season of the Monster anthology series tries to understand whether its subjects are “born or made,” and that Murphy and Brennan were drawn to exploring “what brings a woman to the point of violence.” That line should be quoted, because it clarifies the show’s ethical gamble: it is not asking viewers to sympathize with a killer in the abstract, but to confront the specific pressures that twist women toward brutality. The question is not whether Lizzie swung the axe, but what structural and intimate torments made murder imaginable.
Mapping a Legacy of Female Rage Beyond Fall River
Murphy’s true crime project has been criticized for exploiting the pain of survivors and victims’ families, and the shift to a 19th-century case where everyone involved has long since died is a clear attempt to sidestep that backlash while keeping his fascination with notorious figures intact. But Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story does more than look backward. By weaving in other women who kill—including Vicky Krieps as Elizabeth Báthory and Sarah Paulson as Aileen Wuornos appearing decades later—the season treats Lizzie as an origin point in a lineage of female violence. Beatty has described the show as exploring “a legacy of female rage and reaction to the set of circumstances that they are presented with,” and a connection between Borden and Wuornos that Murphy and Brennan wanted to chart. This is a bold, unsettling move: it implies that patriarchal systems, not pathology alone, echo across time, making the axe a symbol of accumulated fury rather than isolated madness.
Why This Bloody Reimagining Matters Now
The latest Monster installment is arriving into a true-crime landscape that is saturated with procedural coolness and moral hand-wringing, and its choice to go full “Hell hath no fury like a woman with an axe” is both its risk and its relevance. By centering sapphic desire, class resentment, and gendered humiliation, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story turns an over-told case into a mirror for contemporary anger rather than a puzzle to be solved. The series premieres September 17 with eight episodes that promise a “bloody good sapphic nightmare” rather than a tidy courtroom recap. In the end, Murphy is arguing that stories like Lizzie’s should not be preserved in dusty legal records or rhymes, but interrogated as myths about what happens when women are cornered. Whether viewers find that approach cathartic or reckless, this Monster season insists that female rage deserves to be seen in all its messy, dangerous, queer complexity.
