Ryan Murphy’s true-crime anthology finally goes full horror — and Sarah Paulson shows up as Aileen Wuornos.
Netflix has dropped the full official trailer for Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, and Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan aren’t tiptoeing around the most famous unsolved axe murders in American history. They’re swinging.
The fourth season of Netflix’s Monster anthology hits September 17, with Ella Beatty as Lizzie Borden — the Massachusetts woman tried and acquitted for the 1892 hatchet slayings of her father and stepmother, and never replaced as a suspect in the 130+ years since.
The trailer does not make you wait for the red stuff.
“There’s nothing wrong with blood,” Bridget Sullivan, played by Vicky Krieps, tells Lizzie. “Blood is power. Blood is freedom.”
From there we get our clearest look yet at the rot inside the Borden house: Lizzie as a suffocated, repressed young woman under the thumb of her wealthy father Andrew (Charlie Hunnam) and her stepmother Abby (Rebecca Hall). This is not a tasteful PBS reenactment. This is a pressure cooker with the lid welded shut.
Murphy and Brennan Are Taking Some Enormous Swings
Netflix’s own logline describes a repressed daughter and a rebellious maid trapped in a house “built on humiliation and cruelty,” eventually escaping into fantasies of sex, power, and revenge.
That maid is the key. The season leans hard into a romantic and sexual relationship between Lizzie and live-in servant Bridget Sullivan. There’s no historical evidence the two women were lovers, but the theory has floated through Borden fiction for decades — most notably Craig William Macneill’s 2018 film Lizzie with Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart — and Monster is grabbing it with both hands.
In the trailer, Bridget is the one lighting the fuse.
“Your parents, and the way they treat you… they deserve it.”
Lizzie starts inventorying her options. A knife is too easy. A rifle is too kind.
You know what’s coming.
The axe comes out.
Beatty has described her Lizzie as openly fictionalized, while saying she dug deep into the real case before shooting. The season is built around female rage, repression, sexuality, and the vise that Victorian America clamped onto women — and Beatty’s Lizzie is the first woman to headline Monster after seasons devoted to Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein.
Sarah Paulson Shows Up as Aileen Wuornos
The trailer’s biggest gut-punch is saved for the final seconds.
Sarah Paulson. As Aileen Wuornos.
Obviously the two women never crossed paths — Wuornos killed in Florida nearly a century after Fall River. But Monster is reportedly jumping forward in time to chase Borden’s cultural afterlife and the long, strange echo of the American female killer, positioning Wuornos as someone shaped by the myth Lizzie left behind.
Murphy has said there was never a backup plan for the role. “There was only one actress who I thought could [play Wuornos], and that was Sarah Paulson,” he said, adding that Paulson read the script and told him, “It’s going to be hard, but I’ll do it.”
And she may not be the only extra monster in the mix. Krieps is reportedly pulling double duty this season, playing Bridget and Countess Elizabeth Báthory — the 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman whose blood-bathing legend has haunted horror from Hammer’s Countess Dracula to Daughters of Darkness. If that holds, Monster isn’t telling one woman’s story. It’s building a lineage.
What Actually Happened in Fall River
On August 4, 1892, Andrew Borden and his wife Abby were found hacked to death inside their Fall River, Massachusetts home.
Lizzie was arrested and charged. Her trial became a national circus, and in June 1893 a jury acquitted her in roughly an hour and a half. No one else was ever convicted. The case remains open, and Lizzie became permanent American folklore.
Then pop culture did what pop culture does. It gave us the rhyme:
Lizzie Borden took an axe…
The body count in that jingle is flat-out wrong — the real wounds numbered fewer than the schoolyard version claims, and it wasn’t even an axe so much as a hatchet — but accuracy never slowed a good campfire chant. More than 130 years later, people are still arguing about whether she did it.
This Is Not Your Grandmother’s Period Piece
Historical restraint is very clearly not the assignment.
The eight-episode season carries a darkly comic streak and smashes its Victorian setting into thoroughly modern needle drops — Kate Bush, Wet Leg, and Lambrini Girls all turn up on the soundtrack.
Rebecca Hall has compared her vicious take on Abby Borden to Mommie Dearest run through another layer of insanity. Krieps has described the show’s energy as punk and psychedelic rather than prestige-drama stuffy.
That should tell you exactly what kind of Lizzie Borden we’re getting.
The cast also includes Billie Lourd as Lizzie’s older sister Emma, Jessica Barden as actress Nance O’Neil, and Joey Pollari as the Bordens’ uncle John Morse. Ian Brennan wrote all eight episodes. Max Winkler directs six, Sarah Adina Smith handles the other two, and Murphy and Brennan executive produce.
After Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Gein, Monster is once again digging up a corpse that’s already been exhumed a dozen times. The question is whether a bloody, horny, gleefully revisionist take can find something new still breathing inside that house on Second Street.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story premieres September 17 on Netflix.
