Ryan Murphy’s ‘Monster’ Season 4 Trailer and Release Date Revealed for Lizzie Borden Story

True crime anthologies live or die by how well they can make a familiar story feel unsettling all over again. Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan have built an entire franchise on doing exactly that, mining some of America’s most notorious killers for stylized, unnerving television.

Their ‘Monster’ series has already tackled Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein across its first three seasons, each one drawing controversy alongside massive viewership. For its fourth outing, the anthology is finally turning its attention somewhere it hasn’t gone before.

Netflix has released the first trailer for ‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story,’ marking the franchise’s first season built around a female subject. The show retells the infamous 1892 axe murders of Andrew and Abby Borden, a case that has fascinated true crime audiences for well over a century without ever being definitively solved.

The teaser leans hard into that history, opening with the eerie “Lizzie Borden Took an Ax” nursery rhyme playing over striking, blood-soaked imagery. Ella Beatty stars as Lizzie herself, a woman who was tried and ultimately acquitted of the murders due to a lack of direct physical evidence tying her to the crime.

Joining Beatty is Vicky Krieps as Bridget Sullivan, the Borden family’s live-in maid, alongside Charlie Hunnam as Lizzie’s father Andrew and Rebecca Hall as her stepmother Abby. Billie Lourd rounds out the family as Lizzie’s older sister Emma, while Jessica Barden plays Nance O’Neil, described as Lizzie’s actor friend.

According to the official logline, the story follows a repressed daughter of a wealthy New England family and her rebellious maid, both trapped inside a household defined by humiliation and cruelty. The two escape into a fantasy built around sex, power, and revenge, setting the stage for the murders that follow.

Beatty has spoken about what drew her to the role, framing it as part of a larger thematic pattern running through the anthology. “The show is exploring a legacy of female rage and reaction to the set of circumstances that they are presented with,” Beatty told Tudum. “Every season of Monster has been an exercise in understanding the person’s psychology… Are they born or are they made?”

Each season of ‘Monster’ has sparked debate over whether the show glamorizes the very killers it profiles, and early reactions to this trailer suggest that conversation isn’t going away. Still, the franchise has proven itself a reliable ratings draw for Netflix through three previous installments.

Ian Brennan wrote and created this latest chapter, with Murphy and Brennan executive producing alongside Max Winkler, Eric Kovtun, Scott Robertson, Louise Shore, Nissa Diederich, Todd Kubrak, Carl Franklin, and Tanase Popa. Winkler also directs alongside Sarah Adina Smith, giving the season a visual identity distinct from its predecessors.

What makes Lizzie Borden’s story especially fitting for this kind of dramatization is the ambiguity that still surrounds it. Unlike Dahmer or the Menendez brothers, Borden’s guilt was never proven in court, leaving more than a century of speculation about what actually happened inside that Fall River, Massachusetts home.

With eight episodes set to premiere all at once on September 17, viewers will finally get Murphy and Brennan’s full take on one of America’s most enduring unsolved mysteries. Whether it treats Lizzie as victim, villain, or something more complicated remains to be seen once the season actually drops.

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