Netflix Releases Full Trailer for Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story

Netflix has released the full trailer for Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the fourth season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s true crime anthology series. It follows the teaser Netflix put out earlier this month, which gave the trade press their first look at Ella Beatty in the role of Lizzie Borden. This new trailer goes much further, laying out the household cruelty the series argues pushed her toward the axe.

Beatty stars as Lizzie, the repressed daughter of a wealthy Fall River, Massachusetts family in 1892. Vicky Krieps plays Bridget Sullivan, the family’s live-in maid, whose bond with Lizzie sits at the emotional center of the season. Charlie Hunnam and Rebecca Hall play Lizzie’s father Andrew and stepmother Abby, the two people killed in the real Borden case, while Billie Lourd appears as older sister Emma, Joey Pollari as uncle John Morse, and Jessica Barden as Nance O’Neil, an actor and friend of Lizzie’s from later in her life.

The new trailer builds to its most talked about moment. As the household weighs different ways to kill Andrew and Abby, Lizzie cuts in and volunteers, “Let me take the first whack,” reaching for the axe that would make her infamous. It’s the same axe that anchored Netflix’s first teaser, which leaned on the old parlor rhyme that has followed the case for more than 130 years and closed on Lizzie cradling the weapon against a blood red background.

The trailer’s final moments hold its biggest surprise. Sarah Paulson turns up as Aileen Wuornos, the real serial killer executed in 2002, seemingly paying a visit to the Borden house across time. Asked what she thinks happened there, Paulson’s Wuornos answers, “Oh, I f–king know what happened.” It’s a deliberately anachronistic beat that, as TheWrap noted, positions Lizzie Borden as something like a patron figure for the women who came after her.

That framing lines up with what Beatty and the show’s creative team have said about the season. Beatty has described it as tracing a legacy of female rage and the way women react to the circumstances they’re handed, and the Monster franchise’s writers have said every season asks a version of the same question about its subject: are they born, or are they made. Netflix’s official synopsis pushes the same idea, describing Lizzie and Bridget as a pair trapped in a house built on humiliation and cruelty who escape into a fantasy of sex, power, and revenge.

Ian Brennan wrote all eight episodes of the season, with Max Winkler and Sarah Adina Smith directing. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story premieres in full on Netflix on September 17.