October 25, 2025, 3:17 pm | Read time: 5 minutes
The disturbing human lamps of Ed Gein still burn in our minds after the third season of the Netflix series “Monster,” and now their light is set to fall on a woman whose name still echoes within the walls of a house in Fall River, Massachusetts: Lizzie Borden.
What We Know About “Monster: Lizzie Borden”
She was a daughter, heiress, outsider–and perhaps a murderer. Thirty-two ax blows, two bodies, a trial that shook the prudish America of the 19th century. According to the announcement at the end of the third season, the next “Monster” is another dive into the bloody chronicles of reality, dissecting the horror behind the facade. This time with lace collars, Victorian dust, and a hint of perfume that smells like iron.
Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan stay true to form: “You met Ed Gein, now meet Lizzie Borden,” says the Netflix Instagram account. Following the disturbing psychogram of the Plainfield Butcher comes perhaps the series’ most complex character. “Monster: Lizzie Borden” is currently in production in Los Angeles–with Ella Beatty in the lead role as one of the most notorious women in American history.
Alongside her is Charlie Hunnam, this time not as a filleting predator, but as Andrew Borden, Lizzie’s father and potential victim. Also confirmed are Vicky Krieps, Rebecca Hall, Billie Lourd, and Jessica Barden.
Ryan Murphy has turned serial killers into pop icons, but Lizzie will be a different demon: quieter, smarter, more dangerous. Not a man in the basement with knives, but a woman in a neat dress, slicing through society like a surgical blade. Between duty and rebellion, madness and freedom–”Monster: Lizzie Borden” aims to ask the question that has haunted America since 1892: What happens when a woman plays the monster the world has inscribed on her skin?
The Real Lizzie Borden–Myth, Power, and Misogyny
On the morning of August 4, 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden, Lizzie’s father and stepmother, were found bludgeoned in their home. The murder weapon: an ax. The suspect: the daughter herself. But the case was never clear-cut. No bloodstains, no witnesses, no confessions. Just clues, rumors, a dress full of blood–and the moral outrage of a society that saw women as many things, but not murderers.
Lizzie Borden was arrested, charged, and turned into a monster by the press–and then: acquitted. On the witness stand, she wore a pure white dress, a pale face, not a drop of blood. The jury could not, would not, or dared not believe that a woman was capable of such a brutal act. Her acquittal was no triumph, but a paradox: Lizzie received the verdict “not guilty,” yet was never seen as innocent again.
She lived the rest of her life in the same town–wealthy, shunned, feared. The verdict ended the trial, not the suspicion. Thus, she became a mirror of the American nightmare: a woman who did not smile, did not repent, did not faint. That alone made her suspect. Her trial was less a legal proceeding than a moral one–a public dissection of femininity, anger, and societal constraints.
The Monster as a Reflection of Women’s Roles
Lizzie Borden is not a serial killer in the male mold. She kills–if she did at all–not out of lust, power, or sadism, but from the claustrophobic logic of a life with no escape. The Victorian home was her prison, the father figure her warden, silence her only weapon. In this reading, “Monster: Lizzie Borden” becomes the story of a woman who turns against a system that wanted to make her the angel in the house–and damned her to hell for it.
Murphy’s series universe has always operated at the intersection of violence and society. After Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Gein, comes the deconstruction of female criminality. Hopefully not as the demonic woman, but as the result of a patriarchal cage. The series could–if done wisely–put “Monster” in quotes and ask the question: Who is really the monster here–the woman with the alleged ax or the system that made her one?
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Previous Adaptations: From Horror to Pop Feminism
Lizzie Borden has never left American culture. In 1975, “The Legend of Lizzie Borden” with Elizabeth Montgomery (ironically known from the sitcom “Bewitched”) filmed the case–with suggestive eroticism and a Victorian chamber play tone.
In 2014, “Lizzie Borden Took an Ax” with Christina Ricci revisited the myth–as a poppy crime reenactment with almost Gothic fetishization. Followed by the series “The Lizzie Borden Chronicles,” in which Ricci once again wielded the ax as a symbol of female empowerment.
Outlook: What “Monster” Season 4 Could Make of It
Every generation makes of Lizzie what it needs:
- In the 1970s, she was a symbol of female hysteria.
- In the 2010s: a feminist anti-heroine with rebellion in her eyes.
- And with “Monster” Season 4? Perhaps she will finally be told ambivalently–not as a perpetrator or victim, but as a person in transition between restriction and revolt.
Ryan Murphy loves to understand America through its monsters–and this time, the horror lies not in the skinning, but in the skin itself. If “Monster: Lizzie Borden” succeeds, it will not be a bloody series about murder, but a macabre dance about identity, power, and the line between anger and madness. It would have been truly epic if Christina Ricci had swung the ax for the third time.