Monster Anthology Centers First Female Killer in Lizzie Borden Story

Netflix’s Monster anthology returns for a fourth season on September 17, 2026, with Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, marking the franchise’s first installment built around a female killer.

Created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, the season stars Ella Beatty as Lizzie Borden, the Fall River, Massachusetts woman charged and later acquitted in the 1892 axe murders of her father and stepmother.

The series has built its reputation on exploring some of the most notorious killers in American history, with previous seasons devoted to Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein.

Shifting to a female lead represents a recalibration for the anthology, which until now has examined violence through a distinctly male lens.

Borden’s case — a still-debated crime that became a fixture of American folklore — offers a different kind of subject: a woman whose acquittal only deepened the mystery surrounding her.

Cast and Creative Team

Beatty, daughter of Annette Bening and Warren Beatty, takes the lead role after appearing in Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.

The supporting cast includes Vicky Krieps as Bridget Sullivan, Rebecca Hall as Abby Borden, Charlie Hunnam as Andrew Borden, Billie Lourd as Emma Borden, Jessica Barden as Nance O’Neill, Joey Pollari, and Sarah Paulson.

Brennan created and wrote the season.

The executive producers include Murphy, Brennan, Max Winkler, Eric Kovtun, Scott Robertson, Louise Shore, Nissa Diederich, Todd Kubrak, Carl Franklin, and Tanase Popa.

Winkler and Sarah Adina Smith direct.

Inside the Teaser

The first teaser trailer arrived on August 11, 2026, opening with a theater curtain parting to reveal a stage where a piano repeats a single C key.

A voice recites the familiar rhyme — “Lizzie Borden took an axe. Gave her mother 40 whacks” — before cutting to a blood-covered Lizzie and the closing line, “When Lizzie saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.”

The official logline frames the season around the dynamic between Borden and her maid: “When the repressed daughter of a wealthy New England family and her rebellious maid find themselves trapped in a house built on humiliation and cruelty, they escape into a fantasy of sex, power, and revenge.

The gruesome unsolved murders that follow don’t just shock the world — they give birth to an icon who refuses to live imprisoned in a cage, choosing instead to forge her own legend: shocking, monstrous, and gloriously free.”

“I hope I stay feeling challenged forever, and I felt challenged in the best, most satisfying way on Monster,” she said.

“I hope I stay feeling challenged forever, and I felt challenged in the best, most satisfying way on Monster,” she said.

The performances required “an incredible amount of vulnerability, only second to an incredible amount of strength,” he said.

Lizzie Borden Case Background

Lizzie Borden was accused of murdering her father and stepmother with an axe in 1892.

She was acquitted, and lived in Fall River until her death from pneumonia in 1927.

The case has inspired previous dramatizations, including the 2015 series The Lizzie Borden Chronicles starring Christina Ricci and the 2018 film Lizzie starring Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart.

By placing Borden at the center of its fourth season, Monster moves from the serial-killer archetype that defined its first three installments toward a more ambiguous figure — one whose guilt was never legally settled and whose story has been retold, reimagined, and mythologized for more than a century.

Sources

• Tvseriesfinale