Ryan Murphy’s Biggest ‘Monster’ Formula Change Is Also Its Biggest Problem
Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.
Ryan Murphy has done it again. The mastermind behind television horror hits such as American Horror Story, Scream Queens, and American Crime Story debuted a new installment of his media empire this month with the release of the newest season of the Monster anthology on Netflix. The series examines the lives and crimes of some of America’s most infamous killers, and while previous seasons have explored the stories of Jeffrey Dahmer, Erik and Lyle Menendez, and Ed Gein, Season 4 is titled Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.
When it was first announced that Murphy and his team were tackling the story of Lizzie Borden, who was accused of murdering her father and stepmother with an axe in 1892, many fans were curious about how Monster would handle depicting its first female protagonist. However, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story doesn’t just feature one female killer – it features three.
‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’ Ties Three Different Serial Killers Together
One of the most intriguing changes The Lizzie Borden Story makes to the Monster anthology’s formula is putting three female killers in conversation with one another. This isn’t the first time the anthology series has incorporated parallel storylines; 2025’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story brought figures such as Alfred Hitchcock and Tobe Hooper into the narrative. However, those side plots ultimately fed back into the central story, showing how Gein’s crimes rippled throughout popular culture and helped inspire seminal horror movies like Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
In contrast, Borden’s story is braided with that of two other female murderers: Countess Elizabeth Báthory and Aileen Wuornos, but these stories have little to say about Borden’s influence on contemporary culture. Instead, Báthory and Wuornos’ plots serve as their own distinct portraits of women who committed acts of violence. The comparisons between Báthory, Wuornos, and Borden could have made for a fruitful examination of how society responds to female killers. Instead, the season struggles to make its three stories click into place and move as one.
The result is particularly frustrating because Borden herself is such an inherently riveting subject. She was accused of killing her father and stepmother with an axe in 1892 and was ultimately acquitted, becoming one of America’s most enduring boogeymen (or boogeywomen?). More than a century later, the question of what happened inside the Borden household remains inseparable from the question of who Lizzie Borden actually was.
Yet over eight episodes, The Lizzie Borden Story repeatedly raises questions about Borden’s motivations without fully committing to answering them. Was her violence connected to her sexuality? Was she responding to the suffocating restrictions placed on women in Victorian society? Did her physical and psychological struggles contribute to her behavior? The show toys with each possibility in detailed, often bloody, spectacles, but rarely gives any of them enough space to become a genuinely developed character study.
Meet the Women Who Steal Lizzie Borden’s Spotlight
The first is Elizabeth Báthory, the Hungarian noblewoman. Born in 1560 into a wealthy Transylvanian family, Báthory later married Count Ferenc Nádasdy and moved to his castle in Hungary. After her husband’s death, she moved once again to Čachtice Castle in Slovakia, where she allegedly tortured and killed hundreds of young women. Over the years, her reported number of victims is said to have risen to 650. One legend says that Báthory even bathed in the blood of her victims, believing the practice would keep her looking young. While the Countess was eventually put on trial, she managed to escape execution. Instead, she was imprisoned inside her own castle, eventually dying at age 54. In the show, Borden receives a book that unveils the entire bloody affair, and viewers are then catapulted back in time to watch Báthory’s murders play out on-screen. While this storyline is compelling, it’s little more than a flashy detour.
Likewise, Aileen Wuornos makes for moving television, but her depiction in The Lizzie Borden Story does little to enlighten viewers on what makes the titular character tick. Before being convicted and eventually put to death by lethal injection in 2002, Wuornos confessed to killing seven men between 1989 and 1990. In The Lizzie Borden Story, Wuornos is shown as being obsessed with Borden. In a moment of apparent psychosis, she even imagines herself having a conversation with the spectral axe-murderer.
The More ‘Monster’ Explores, the Less We Learn About Lizzie Borden
While both Báthory and Wuornos are themselves series-worthy characters, their storylines feel distinctly out of place in The Lizzie Borden Story. Gein’s narrative companions were pop culture figures whose inclusions showcased the cultural ripple effects of his crimes. Báthory and Wuornos, on the other hand, have no real connection to Borden. Wuornos’ fixation on Borden was invented by the Monster team, while Báthory’s mass killings and speculated blood bathing have little in common with Borden’s intimate, familial crimes.
Previous seasons of Monster plumbed the depths of individual men’s psyches, but The Lizzie Borden Story is content to simply place these three female killers beside one another and hope the comparison speaks for itself. In reality, the writers have reduced all three figures in the process. By splitting the narrative three ways, the show leaves the audience with surprisingly little sense of who Borden actually was, and raises the question: Would the season have been better served by letting its first female “monster” stand on her own?
- Release Date
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2026 – 2026-00-00
- Network
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Netflix
- Directors
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Max Winkler, Sarah Adina Smith
- Writers
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Ian Brennan
Cast
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Vicky Krieps
Bridget Sullivan
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Ella Beatty
Lizzie Borden
