Netflix has released a bloody first look at Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, and Ella Beatty's Lizzie is not presented as a distant figure from a history book. The teaser puts her inside a house full of pressure, resentment, and secrets, then lets the blood arrive before the answers do.
The fourth season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's anthology series arrives on Netflix September 17. It is the first Monster season built around a woman accused of murder, and the new footage makes that change in perspective impossible to miss.
The trailer turns the Borden case into a pressure cooker
The teaser opens in the Borden home, where Lizzie and the family's live-in maid, Bridget Sullivan, are boxed in by money, rules, and the people who control the house. The setting looks polished, but the mood is anything but safe. A few quiet conversations carry the threat of an argument that has been waiting years to happen.
The famous murders are part of the hook, but Netflix is not giving away a simple answer in the first look. Beatty appears covered in blood, while the camera keeps returning to the rooms where Lizzie's anger and fear have nowhere to go. The trailer wants viewers to wonder what happened before it asks them to decide who is guilty.
Ella Beatty plays Monster's first female central figure
Netflix describes Lizzie as the first female Monster, which gives the season a different kind of tension from the earlier chapters about Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein. The show is still interested in a notorious crime, but its version of Lizzie is built around repression, rage, and the feeling of being trapped inside a family that expects obedience.
That does not turn Lizzie into a hero. It does give the story room to examine how a crime becomes a legend, especially when the person at its center is a young woman whose motives were never fully settled. Beatty's performance looks less like a courtroom reconstruction and more like a slow breakdown that the whole house can feel.
What really happened to Lizzie Borden?
In 1892, Andrew Borden and his wife, Abby, were killed with an axe inside their Fall River, Massachusetts, home. Lizzie, Andrew's daughter and Abby's stepdaughter, was accused of the murders and later acquitted. The case never produced a clean explanation that ended the public fascination, which is why the name Lizzie Borden still carries a mix of crime, folklore, and unanswered questions.
The series is using that uncertainty as a storytelling engine. Its official synopsis places Lizzie and Bridget in a household shaped by humiliation and cruelty before the murders change how the country sees them. The show can explore the real case while also showing how the nursery rhyme and newspaper headlines turned a complicated trial into a permanent pop-culture image.
The cast reaches well beyond the Borden family
Beatty leads the season as Lizzie, with Vicky Krieps playing Bridget Sullivan. Charlie Hunnam is Andrew Borden, Rebecca Hall is Abby Borden, Billie Lourd plays Lizzie's older sister Emma, and Jessica Barden appears as Nance O'Neil, an actor in Lizzie's orbit.
Sarah Paulson is also part of the season as Aileen Wuornos, the real-life killer she has been announced to portray in Monster. That role widens the series beyond the Borden house and gives the season a second crime-story thread without changing who the main first look belongs to: Beatty's blood-streaked Lizzie.
That mix of performers gives the season two different kinds of attention: the period story has a recognizable ensemble, while Beatty remains the face viewers will associate with this chapter. Netflix is selling the atmosphere first and saving the final judgment for the episodes.
When does Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story release?
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story premieres on Netflix September 17, 2026. Netflix has not used the teaser to reveal every turn in the case, so viewers still do not know how closely the finished season will follow the surviving trial record or where it will take its biggest dramatic liberties.
That is probably the right approach for this story. Everyone already knows the rhyme, the axe, and the accusation. The reason to watch this version is seeing what happens in the rooms between those facts, and whether the show can make Lizzie feel like a person before she becomes a monster in the public imagination.
The first look is short, but it gives the season a clear identity: gothic, angry, and interested in the difference between a woman committing a crime and a country deciding what that crime means. The full story arrives September 17.
