Netflix has released the full official trailer for Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, giving audiences their darkest and most revealing look yet at Ella Beatty’s transformation into one of America’s most infamous accused murderers.
The fourth instalment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster anthology returns to Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892, where Andrew Borden and his wife Abby were brutally killed inside their family home.
Andrew’s daughter Lizzie was arrested and tried for both murders.
She was acquitted in 1893.
No one else was ever convicted.
More than 130 years later, the identity of the killer remains officially unresolved — but Lizzie Borden’s name has become permanently linked to the axe murders through true crime, popular culture and one of America’s most enduring criminal legends.
Monster is now creating its own highly fictionalised interpretation of how that legend may have begun.
Ella Beatty stars as Lizzie, presented in the trailer as a young woman suffocating inside an oppressive household controlled by her wealthy father Andrew and stepmother Abby.
Charlie Hunnam plays Andrew Borden, while Rebecca Hall portrays Abby.
Their home initially appears respectable from the outside.
Inside, however, the trailer presents a family defined by control, humiliation, repression and resentment.
Then Bridget Sullivan arrives.
Played by Vicky Krieps, the Borden family’s new maid — known as Maggie — becomes an increasingly important influence on Lizzie.
Their relationship is romantic, rebellious and potentially dangerous.
Maggie represents a kind of freedom Lizzie has never experienced before, encouraging her to imagine a life outside the social and familial restrictions surrounding her.
But those fantasies gradually become darker.
The full trailer goes considerably further than Netflix’s earlier teaser in suggesting how its fictionalised version of Lizzie may move from resentment towards violence.
Maggie openly challenges the way Lizzie’s parents treat her and begins encouraging the idea that they deserve consequences.
Soon the conversation becomes horrifyingly practical.
What weapon should someone use?
A knife?
Too easy.
A rifle?
Too kind.
An axe becomes the answer.
From that point, the trailer moves from gothic family drama into blood-soaked psychological horror.
Ella Beatty appears covered in blood as glimpses of the murders begin breaking through the carefully controlled Victorian world surrounding the Borden family.
But Monster does not appear interested simply in recreating an infamous crime scene.
The season is also exploring why Lizzie Borden became an icon.
Her trial occurred at a time when many people struggled to believe that a respectable woman from a wealthy New England family could be capable of such extreme violence.
That contradiction — between society’s expectations of women and the possibility of female rage — becomes one of the central ideas of the new season.
And the trailer reveals an unexpected way the series intends to explore that legacy.
Sarah Paulson appears as Aileen Wuornos.
Wuornos has no direct historical connection to Lizzie Borden.
She was born more than seventy years after the Borden murders and killed men in Florida between 1989 and 1990 before being convicted of six murders and eventually executed in 2002.
Monster instead uses Wuornos thematically.
Scenes set decades after Lizzie’s lifetime explore how Borden’s legend continued to influence the cultural idea of the female murderer.
Paulson’s transformation is striking.
The trailer briefly moves away from nineteenth-century Fall River and into a much later period, where Wuornos speaks about the Borden case as someone who understands violence from an entirely different perspective.
Her appearance immediately expands the scope of the season.
This is no longer only a dramatization of what may have happened inside one Massachusetts house in 1892.
It becomes a story about the cultural legacy created by that crime.
Previous seasons of Monster examined Jeffrey Dahmer, Lyle and Erik Menendez, and Ed Gein.
The Lizzie Borden Story is the first instalment to place a woman accused of murder at the centre of the anthology.
That difference appears fundamental to Murphy and Brennan’s approach.
Rather than asking only whether Lizzie committed the murders, the series is interested in how a woman from her time might reach the point where violence becomes imaginable — and why society became so fascinated by the possibility that she did.
Beatty has described the character she plays as a deliberately fictionalised interpretation built from the historical record rather than an attempt to claim certainty about what actually happened.
That distinction is important.
The real Lizzie Borden was acquitted.
The murders of Andrew and Abby Borden remain unsolved.
Monster is drama, not a historical verdict.
Within that fictional framework, however, the series appears prepared to embrace the most famous version of the legend.
The trailer shows resentment turning into fantasy.
Fantasy becomes conspiracy.
And eventually the respectable Borden household is painted red.
Billie Lourd joins the cast as Lizzie’s older sister Emma Borden, while Jessica Barden plays actress Nance O’Neil, who became closely associated with Lizzie later in her life.
But the emotional centre of the trailer belongs to Beatty and Krieps.
Lizzie and Maggie are presented as two women trapped within different forms of social confinement, finding liberation in one another before that desire for freedom begins moving towards something far more destructive.
Their relationship gives the season elements of romance, psychological horror and dark comedy alongside the true-crime framework audiences expect from Monster.
The question hanging over everything remains the same one that has surrounded the Borden case since 1892.
What actually happened inside that house?
History never produced a definitive answer.
Monster is instead interested in the legend created by the uncertainty.
A woman was accused.
A jury acquitted her.
The murders remained unsolved.
And Lizzie Borden became immortal.
More than a century later, her name still carries an axe.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story premieres globally on Netflix on September 17, 2026.
Watch the official trailer below.
