Netflix's 'Monsters' Turns to Lizzie Borden in First Female-Led Season

Netflix's "Monsters" anthology is turning its lens on a woman for the first time, dramatising the case of Lizzie Borden, who was tried and acquitted of the 1892 ax murders of her father and stepmother.

"Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story" begins streaming on Thursday. Ella Beatty plays Borden, with Charlie Hunnam as her father, Andrew Borden, and Rebecca Hall as her stepmother, Abby Borden.

Beatty described the season as a fresh direction for the biographical crime drama, saying creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan were keen to examine the story of a woman accused of murder. Earlier instalments of the series focused on Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, and Lyle and Erik Menendez.

The case has long been woven into American culture through a folk rhyme and numerous portrayals across music, radio, film, theatre and television, even as much of what happened inside the Borden home remains unexplained.

Hall said she knew Borden as an almost mythological figure and was familiar with the nursery rhyme, but had not realised she was never convicted or that so many details of the case were shrouded in mystery.

For director Max Winkler, those gaps opened a way to examine the constraints on women in the 1890s, when, he said, a woman was treated much like property and expected above all to marry and bear children. Borden, he noted, could not be married off.

Winkler said the frustration and disappointment surrounding her position in society allowed the show to probe female rage and what can push people towards violence when they do not fit the expected mould. He added that the series does not assume anyone is born evil, and that learning what pressures drive a person to snap can show that anyone is capable of killing — the difference lying in what they are willing to kill for, or what leaves them no choice.