Netflix has set a release date for the latest chapter of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster anthology. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story will premiere September 17, and the first-look images are already showing Ella Beatty in blood-spattered period costume as the title character.
The Series’ First Female Monster
This installment follows the anthology’s first female “monster,” played by Beatty, alongside Vicky Krieps as Bridget Sullivan, Rebecca Hall as Abby Borden, and Charlie Hunnam as Andrew Borden. The rest of the cast includes Billie Lourd, Joey Pollari, Sarah Paulson, and Jessica Barden. The show is created and written by Brennan, with Murphy and Brennan among the executive producers, and Max Winkler and Sarah Adina Smith directing.
“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.”
A Story That Never Gets Old
Lizzie Borden has haunted American pop culture for more than a century. After she was acquitted of the 1892 murders of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts, her trial became a nationwide sensation, and she’s been reinvented on screen many times — including Lifetime’s The Lizzie Borden Chronicles with Christina Ricci and the 2018 film Lizzie starring Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart. Murphy and Brennan’s take leans into the psychological and sensational angles the anthology is known for.
Why It Matters
The Monster franchise has been a ratings and cultural juggernaut for Netflix, and a Lizzie Borden installment is arguably its most famous subject yet. Between the stacked cast and the true-crime fixation that made the series a hit, this fourth season is shaping up to be one of the platform’s biggest streaming events of the fall. Fans of the genre have a September date to circle.
