Netflix has officially dropped the first trailer for the fourth season of its Emmy-winning true-crime anthology Monster, and this time the focus is on one of America’s most infamous unsolved cases: the 1892 axe murders of Andrew and Abby Borden.
Titled Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the new season stars Ella Beatty in the title role as Lizzie Borden, the Fall River, Massachusetts woman who was accused—and later acquitted—of brutally killing her father and stepmother with an axe. The trailer wastes no time leaning into the legend, opening with the chilling nursery rhyme that has haunted the case for more than a century:
“Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks…”
Stylish, blood-splattered, and deliberately unsettling, the teaser shows Beatty’s Lizzie gripping an axe, her face streaked with crimson, as the camera lingers on artful shots of Victorian-era repression boiling over into violence. The final image—Lizzie cradling the weapon against a blood-red background—leaves little doubt that this season intends to portray her as far more than an innocent bystander.
Joining Beatty are Charlie Hunnam as Andrew Borden, Rebecca Hall as Abby Borden, Billie Lourd as Lizzie’s sister Emma, and Vicky Krieps as the family maid Bridget Sullivan. Sarah Paulson also appears in a supporting role. All eight episodes were written by series co-creator Ian Brennan, who previously collaborated with Ryan Murphy on the Dahmer, Menendez, and Ed Gein installments.
Brennan has already addressed the inevitable questions about exploitation. “This show is always trying to not be exploitative,” he said. “It’s trying to actually show that you can pull back too much when you’re telling a macabre story.”
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story continues the anthology’s pattern of examining real American “monsters” through a glossy, high-production lens. After Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein, Lizzie becomes the first female subject of the series—an angle the creative team has described as exploring “female rage and repression” in a rigidly patriarchal 19th-century household.
The complete season drops on Netflix on September 17, 2026.
Whether the series will finally tip the scales of public opinion on Lizzie Borden’s guilt remains to be seen. One thing is already clear from the trailer: Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan are once again ready to turn a century-old true-crime mystery into must-watch television.
DC Fanboy! Superman is the greatest comic book character of all time. Favorite movies are Man of Steel, Goonies, Back To the Future
