Trailer reaction: Sarah Paulson's Aileen Wuornos needs just five words to take over Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story
Netflix released the full trailer for the fourth Monster season on August 20, 2026. Two minutes of Fall River gloom, an ax, a lot of blood, and a stealth casting reveal saved for the final seconds.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story premieres September 17. Ella Beatty plays Lizzie. And the trailer's last shot belongs to Sarah Paulson as Aileen Wuornos, cigarette in hand, answering a voiceover about how nobody really knows what happened at the Borden house:
"Oh, I f---ing know what happened."
What the rest of the trailer shows
A theater curtain, a piano key striking by itself, and the nursery rhyme in voiceover. Then the household: Lizzie under the thumb of her wealthy father Andrew (Charlie Hunnam) and stepmother Abby (Rebecca Hall), with maid Bridget Sullivan (Vicky Krieps) doing most of the talking about weapons — a knife is too easy, a rifle too kind. The camera eventually lands on the ax. Lizzie swings it. Lizzie walks through the house soaked. A detective announces to a roomful of cops that no woman could have done this.
Subtlety was never on the call sheet.
Why Wuornos is in a Lizzie Borden season
Wuornos killed seven men in Florida in 1989 and 1990 and was executed by the state in 2002 — roughly a century after the August 4, 1892 murders in Massachusetts. The two women never overlapped by any measure. Ryan Murphy's pitch is that the season isn't a straight retelling but a jump forward through Borden's cultural afterlife, with Wuornos as one of the women shaped by the myth. Beatty told Tudum that Murphy and Ian Brennan were interested in mapping a connection between them.
The cast around Beatty
- Vicky Krieps as Bridget Sullivan, the maid.
- Charlie Hunnam and Rebecca Hall as Andrew and Abby Borden.
- Billie Lourd as Lizzie's sister Emma.
- Jessica Barden as actress Nance O'Neil, plus Joey Pollari.
Krieps was also announced to play Countess Elizabeth Báthory, which tells you how loosely this season plans to treat the calendar.
The Charlize Theron comparison is unavoidable
Theron won the Best Actress Oscar in 2004 for playing Wuornos in Patty Jenkins's Monster — a performance so total it defined the role for two decades. Paulson gets a fraction of the screen time and, on trailer evidence, is going somewhere flatter and meaner with the accent.
For the record: this is the first Monster season built around a female subject, after Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein. The reveal at the end suggests it won't be the last one this season either.
