Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Has Lust and Wrath in Bloody Trailer – Watch It Now
Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster turns infamous American crimes into prestige limited series that, so far, have dominated the platform’s most-watched charts for weeks at a time. The anthology launched in 2022 with Evan Peters starring as Jeffrey Dahmer, then moved through the Menendez brothers’ 1989 murder of their parents and, most recently, Charlie Hunnam’s turn as grave robber Ed Gein. Each installment has presented lavish period production with deliberately provocative interpretations of real killers, raising complaints from true crime enthusiasts and the families of killers and victims. Still, Monsters remains one of Netflix’s flagship series, and Ella Beatty will now step into the role of Lizzie Borden, the Massachusetts woman acquitted of hacking her father and stepmother to death with an axe in 1892.
“Blood is life. Blood is freedom,” Beatty’s Lizzie declares over the opening moments of the newly released trailer for Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, confirming that Netflix’s fourth true crime installment is shaping up to be its most violent yet. The footage opens on Lizzie crushing a red berry between her fingers before cutting to a blood-streaked axe striking its victim again and again, intercut with images of Lizzie herself soaked in blood. The imagery confirms that Murphy and Brennan built this season around the still-unsolved 1892 axe murders of Andrew Borden (Charlie Hunnam) and his wife Abby Borden (Rebecca Hall), but they have decided that Lizzie is guilty of the barbaric crime.
The trailer also shows Andrew and Abby Borden mistreating both Lizzie and Maggie Sullivan (Vicky Krieps), the family’s live-in maid. The pair are shown actively conspiring against Andrew and Abby, giving Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story a more intimate angle on a case that has never been officially solved. The footage also underlines how Lizzie and Bridget develop a romantic relationship, with the new season doubling down as a steamy sapphic romance between two vicious killers.
Who Was Lizzie Borden in Real Life?
The Bordens’ murder remains one of the most famous unsolved crimes in American history. On August 4, 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were found bludgeoned to death inside their Fall River, Massachusetts home, with Andrew struck roughly eleven times and Abby nineteen. Lizzie was arrested a week later, and her trial the following June turned into a national obsession. Prosecutors built their case entirely on circumstantial evidence, including a hatchet recovered from the basement with a broken handle and a dress Lizzie admitted to burning after the murders. A local pharmacist was prepared to testify that Lizzie had tried to purchase poison days earlier, but the judge excluded that testimony. Without physical evidence tying her to the crime, the jury deliberated for roughly ninety minutes before acquitting Lizzie. No one else was ever charged, and the murders remain officially unsolved more than a century later.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story takes clear liberties with that record. The trailer treats Lizzie as guilty and builds focus on the romance between Lizzie and Maggie, a relationship that traces back to Evan Hunter’s 1984 novel Lizzie rather than any historical evidence. The approach mirrors criticism the Monster anthology has faced before. The Dahmer season drew backlash for casting Evan Peters in a way critics said romanticized the killer, while the Menendez brothers season prompted Erik Menendez to call the show’s implication of an incestuous relationship between him and his brother dishonest and slanderous. Even Ed Gein had his crimes amplified and exaggerated in the name of shock value. Approached as fiction, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story looks amazing, though. So, as long as you accept the series uses true crime as scaffolding for a heightened psychological drama rather than a documentary reconstruction, the new trailer guarantees you’ll have a good time.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story premieres on Netflix on September 17, 2026.
