19 Behind-The-Scenes Secrets You Probably Didn't Know About How Monster Season 4 Was Made

The Lizzie Borden Story may be the bloodiest iteration of Netflix’s anthology series to date.

When Lizzie Borden’s father and stepmother were murdered with a hatchet in their Massachusetts home in 1892, the 32-year-old became the prime suspect.

Although Lizzie was later acquitted of her crimes, the case has continued to fascinate people, and is still being discussed more than a century later.

Now, Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Netflix anthology series, Monster, has brought Lizzie’s gruesome story to the forefront yet again – albeit with some creative license applied.

Starring Ella Beatty alongside Charlie Hunnam and Rebecca Hall, true crime fans have been tuning in to watch the fourth iteration of Monster, which explores themes of female rage and repression, in their droves.

But how did the Monster team go about bringing The Lizzie Borden Story to the small screen in all its gore-filled glory?

Here are 19 behind-the-scenes facts you probably didn’t know about Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’s creation...

Everyone involved felt like season 4 was the right time for a female lead in Monster

After seasons following Jeffrey Dahmer, Lyle and Erik Menendez and Ed Gein, Monster’s showrunners felt like it was time for a woman to take centre stage.

“[It] just felt like we owed it,” co-creator Ian Brennan told People in August. “We’d sort of over-indexed on men for the series, and it just felt like this was the right time and the right subject to look at to look squarely at the idea of female rage.”

It didn’t take long for Lizzie Borden to emerge as producers’ top choice when looking at women they could hook a season of Monster on

After the team decided they wanted a woman to lead season four, they soon discovered they had a smaller pool of female killers to select from.

In the end, Ian said that he and his collaborators wound up settling on Lizzie Borden because, while she is “enigmatic as a historical figure” and the case of her family’s murders is infamous, little is really known about the woman herself.

“When we began to dig into the research, I was just immediately taken with how much I felt for her and how much I got why she did what she did,” he recalled.

“There was something that was really, really, very likable about her as a person despite the crime that I think she likely committed because she was sort of a caged animal.”

He added that Lizzie was a “product of a time [when] it was really difficult to be a young woman”.

There was a good reason why Elizabeth Báthory and Aileen Wuornos were also chosen to appear in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story

The third season of Monster, The Ed Gein Story, jumped back and forth in time, connecting the killer to Nazi Ilsa Koch and the actor Anthony Perkins, who played a character inspired by Ed Gein in Psycho.

Similarly, while the fourth series of Monster centres mostly on Lizzie Borden, it does also feature two notorious female killers from very different eras.

The Lizzie Borden Story links its central figure, who was born in the 1800s, with Countess Elizabeth Báthory, a 16th-century noblewoman nicknamed the Bloody Countess, and Aileen Wuornos, a serial killer who murdered seven men between 1989 and 1990.

Ian felt that incorporating these two women into the story added a “third dimension”, telling People: “It just made it come alive all the more.”

Ella Beatty has also explained why the two unconnected murderers make an appearance in the series.

“The show is exploring a legacy of female rage and reaction to the set of circumstances that they are presented with,” Ella told Tudum, adding that the showrunners were keen to explore how female rage connected Aileen and Lizzie.

“Every season of Monster has been an exercise in understanding the person’s psychology. Are they born or are they made?” she added. “I knew from the beginning that Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan were really interested in exploring what brings a woman to the point of violence.”

Co-creator Ian also highlighted the idea of female rage when talking about the show’s multi-generational subplots.

“We were able to look at rage, female rage, and women who kill as less of an aberration throughout time than actually a throughline and an aspect of our species and existence in society,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in September.

“The cages that we put women in and the things they will do to get out of those cages was really interesting.”

Sarah Paulson’s performance as Aileen Wuornos had the show’s director in tears on set

Regular Ryan Murphy collaborator Sarah Paulson was chosen to star as the real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos.

“She’s an unbelievable actor who does so much preparation and physical work. It was my........

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