Which Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Character Are You?

Learn More About Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story

Ryan Murphy's anthology series "Monster" heads back to the 19th century for its fourth installment, "Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story," premiering September 17, 2026 on Netflix. After tackling Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein in previous seasons, the anthology turns to one of America's oldest true-crime obsessions: the 1892 axe murders of Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts, and the trial of their daughter Lizzie, who was ultimately acquitted and has haunted American folklore ever since.

Ella Beatty leads the season as Lizzie Borden, the unmarried thirty-two-year-old daughter of a wealthy but famously tightfisted businessman, whose life was defined by a house that felt more like a cage than a home. Charlie Hunnam plays Andrew Borden, the controlling patriarch whose reputation for pinching pennies extended to nearly every corner of the household, and Rebecca Hall plays Abby Borden, Lizzie's stepmother, whose uneasy place in the family made her an outsider in her own home.

Vicky Krieps plays Bridget Sullivan, the Bordens' Irish maid, who was in the house the day of the murders and became one of the case's most important, and most overlooked, witnesses. Billie Lourd rounds out the core family as Emma Borden, Lizzie's older sister, whose loyalty to her sibling was tested for the rest of her life. Jessica Barden appears as Nance O'Neil, the actress who became Lizzie's close companion in the years after the trial, a relationship that has fascinated historians and biographers for over a century.

What makes the Borden case such durable material for true-crime storytelling is exactly what made it a sensation in 1892: nobody was ever definitively proven guilty. Lizzie was tried and acquitted within a year of the murders, but the case never really closed in the court of public opinion. The old schoolyard rhyme, invented by a newspaperman and never accurate about the number of blows struck, turned the case into folklore almost immediately, and it's stayed there for more than 130 years.

Beyond the mystery itself, the show is interested in the quieter tensions that defined the Borden household long before that August morning: money hoarded instead of spent, a stepmother never fully accepted, a maid who saw everything and said little, and two adult daughters with no real independence of their own. Murphy's anthology format has always used its true-crime cases as a lens on the domestic pressures surrounding them, and the Borden house is about as pressurized as 19th-century domestic life got.

If Gothic period pieces about repressed households and simmering secrets are your thing, this season should scratch that itch. Fans who enjoyed the anthology's previous true-crime deep dive should also check out our Which Monster: The Ed Gein Story Character Are You? quiz for another season of the same series.

Take the quiz above to find out whether you're Lizzie, Bridget, Abby, Andrew, or Emma.