Blood is everywhere in the new footage. Ella Beatty's Lizzie holds an axe, the Borden household becomes increasingly claustrophobic, and Netflix's own description of the show plainly depicts her as killing her father and stepmother.
History is less definitive. Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892. Lizzie was prosecuted the following year and acquitted, and the killings remain officially unsolved.
The relationship with Bridget Sullivan changes the shape of the story
Vicky Krieps plays Bridget “Maggie” Sullivan, the Borden family's live-in maid. Netflix describes Lizzie and Maggie as women trapped inside a wealthy New England household built on humiliation and cruelty, escaping into fantasies of sex, power and revenge.
The trailer makes Maggie unusually active in that construction. She tells Lizzie that the way her parents treat her means they deserve retaliation, turning the domestic relationship into a dramatic pressure point rather than keeping Sullivan at the edge of the historical mystery.
Beatty has described the season in terms of female rage and repression, saying the role allowed her to explore a person whose story has reached almost mythological proportions in American culture.
Aileen Wuornos turns the season into something larger than a period reconstruction
Sarah Paulson's presence makes the anthology's intentions even clearer. She plays Aileen Wuornos in scenes set long after Borden's lifetime. There is no historical meeting to dramatise: Borden died in 1927, almost three decades before Wuornos was born.
Instead, Netflix says the series uses Wuornos to explore Borden's cultural legacy. The connection is thematic, built around the public idea of female violence and the way later generations interpret women who become infamous through murder.
That is a more ambitious narrative device than simply revisiting an old courtroom case. It is also one that makes the distinction between documented history and the anthology's interpretation particularly important.
Familiar actors, radically different identities
Monster continues to treat its cast as an anthology company of sorts. Charlie Hunnam moves directly from portraying Ed Gein in the third installment to playing Andrew Borden here. Rebecca Hall is Abby Borden, Billie Lourd plays Lizzie's older sister Emma, and Jessica Barden appears as actor Nance O'Neil.
The centre belongs to Beatty. Netflix explicitly positions Borden as the anthology's first female “monster,” a phrase that reveals plenty about the season before its eight episodes have even arrived.
Monster already has the audience for another notorious case
Netflix says Dahmer reached one billion viewing hours within its first sixty days. The Menendez installment later received eleven Emmy nominations, while The Ed Gein Story opened with 12.2 million views globally in its first three days and earned seven Emmy nominations in 2026.
The Lizzie Borden Story arrives on September 17. Its challenge is not finding an infamous name. It is dramatizing one whose lasting image as an axe murderer has always been more certain in popular culture than it ever was in a courtroom.
