MONSTER: THE LIZZIE BORDEN STORY Trailer Takes an Axe to One of America’s Most Infamous Murder Mysteries

Lizzie Borden has been haunting American true crime history for more than a century, and now Ryan Murphy is handing her an axe and giving her the Monster treatment.

Netflix has released the trailer for Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the fourth installment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s true crime anthology series.

Ella Beatty takes on the title role as the infamous New England woman accused of brutally murdering her father and stepmother, and the new season looks ready to dig into the violence, repression, sexuality, and mythology surrounding one of America’s most enduring murder mysteries.

The official logline lays out the twisted family dynamic at the center of the eight-episode season: “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.”

Beatty plays Borden as a 32-year-old Sunday school teacher whose seemingly respectable life became forever linked to an incredibly grisly crime.

Borden was accused of murdering her father, Andrew Borden, and stepmother, Abby Borden, with an axe in 1892. The killings were particularly savage, with the two victims suffering nearly 40 blows between them.

Borden went on trial the following year, but a jury acquitted her. The murders were never officially solved, leaving plenty of room for speculation, theories, books, movies, television shows, and that famous playground rhyme that turned Borden into a macabre piece of American folklore.

Joining Beatty is Rebecca Hall as Abby Borden, while Charlie Hunnam plays Andrew Borden. Hunnam is coming right off his Emmy-nominated performance as serial killer Ed Gein in the previous chapter of Monster, making his return to Murphy and Brennan’s gruesome playground in a very different role.

The cast also includes Billie Lourd, Joey Pollari, Sarah Paulson, and Jessica Barden. Murphy and Brennan co-created Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, with Brennan also serving as a writer.

This fourth Monster installment also brings a major change to the anthology by putting a woman at the center of its story for the first time. Previous seasons explored Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein, while The Lizzie Borden Story heads much further back into American history for a crime that has remained lodged in pop culture for generations.

Of course, Hollywood has taken several swings at the Lizzie Borden story before. Christina Ricci played her in Lifetime’s The Lizzie Borden Chronicles, while Chloë Sevigny portrayed Borden in the 2018 film Lizzie, which also starred Kristen Stewart as maid Bridget Sullivan.

Murphy and Brennan seem interested in the suffocating Borden household, Lizzie’s relationship with the family maid, and the transformation of a murder suspect into a figure whose name became more famous than the actual facts surrounding the crime.

Whether Lizzie Borden really picked up that axe remains one of the big unanswered questions in American criminal history. More than 130 years later, people are still fascinated by what happened inside that Massachusetts house.

Now Monster gets to take its own bloody crack at the mystery.