Monster Season 4: How Netflix’s The Lizzie Borden Story Was Made

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…

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.”

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”.

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.”

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 first time working with her and I was stunned by what happens when she comes out on set,” director Max Winkler told The Hollywood Reporter.

“My favourite scene that she did – because it really allowed her to improvise a lot – was the scene with her having her final meal,” the director admitted, revealing he cried when watching her perform Aileen’s sentimental last moments. “Just the mixture between protective strength and unbelievable vulnerability,”.

Sarah also already had a working relationship with Ella, having previously acted with her in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play Appropriate, for which she won a Tony Award.

“We met doing a play together three years ago and became very close. She was such a part of the creative process for me from the very beginning,” Ella enthused to Tudum.

“We cast a super wide net and nobody could do it until we saw her,” co-showrunner Ian told Tudum.

He added: “They say you can tell within the first five seconds if the actor has the role, and that was completely the case here, after watching very good actresses try.”

The actor – who is the daughter of Hollywood icons Annette Bening and Warren Beatty – immediately felt connected with Lizzie Borden when the project first came her way.

“I remember making the audition tape and thinking, ‘I understand this person’,” she told Variety.

“When I found out that I had gotten the part, I was over the moon and also really scared. I felt a huge responsibility to the part, to the anthology, to the real person,” she added.

“I think immediately I just wanted to start working on it. How does she move? How does she dream? How does she think? How does she speak? How does she blink?”

Little to nothing is known about Abby Borden, other than the fact she was killed by her stepdaughter more than 130 years ago.

Played in Monster by Rebecca Hall, Lizzie’s stepmother is portrayed in the series as deeply unhappy, displaying cruelty toward her stepdaughter and frustration in her marriage.

This characterisation was largely created by the writers, due to how little has been recorded about Abby Borden.

“There’s very little about her out there, and I could already tell from reading the script that Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy had taken liberties and created a character that they were interested in for this show,” she told Collider. “So I felt like the only thing I could do was do the same thing,”

Rebecca admitted the lack of public information about her character gave her freedom to create something “unique and specific”, deliberately trying not to take inspiration from past depictions of “evil stepmothers” from fairytale lore.

The Golden Globe nominee looked to Bette Davis and Joan Crawford to create Abby’s specific accent.

“When I was thinking about the accent, which I wanted to be not really from anywhere as much as just Abby, I kept thinking about those mid-Atlantic accents that actors created in the 1930s that didn’t actually exist but had this sort of affect of like, ‘I’m extremely posh and elitist’,” she added to Collider.

“We had such a great time working on the last season. It was just a joy,” Ian told People. “Charlie, you just can’t get enough of it. He’s so lovely and has such a great presence on set, and it just felt like, ‘Oh, this is perfect for him’.”

The showrunner was particularly impressed with Charlie’s range and ability to make any character sympathetic, no matter how evil they were.

“He just rounds out every character with this deep well of sympathy that really filled out what could otherwise be a stereotypical bad dad,” Ian added. “He really filled [the character] out in such beautiful detail.”

While people already knew plenty about Ed Gein before Monster dedicated a season to him, comparably, the same could not be said for Andrew Borden.

However, this proved to be a positive thing for the actor playing him.

“[I was] liberated from the responsibility of playing a historical figure because there’s just not that much known, and so we were able to invent him to a certain degree,” Charlie told People. “It’s a real fertile playground for actors to come into this world.”

While there are no reports of Andrew Borden having had a stutter in real life, this was a trait that felt right to Charlie when he was reading the script.

“There’s one moment in the script that [the writer] wrote in that he sort of has a stutter, but it’s in a moment of sort of emotional duress,” he explained to CBR.

The Sons Of Anarchy actor explained that “that stutter in that voice just started to present itself to me” as he continued “running back” to the script and “exploring it further”.

The cast and crew of Monster couldn’t film the show inside Lizzie Borden’s real home, as the rumoured haunted house is now a bed and breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts.

“I couldn’t believe that,” Monster co-showrunner Ian Brennan admitted about the discovery of the house’s new lease of life as a B&B. “It’s stunning.”

As a result, the scenes set in her house were actually filmed on a purpose-made set in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the subplot involving Elizabeth Báthory was filmed in a castle in Rome, rather than Báthor Castle, where the countess lived in real life, about 170 miles from Budapest in a town called Nyírbátor.

“We had shot season four, most of it, in LA,” cinematographer Michael Bauman told CBR back in January. “But we have about five weeks of work [in] Rome. There are lots of castles here, and that’s mainly the reason [we filmed there].”

The team behind Monster loved Vicky Krieps so much in The Ed Gein Story, they cast her twice in the follow-up. She appears as both Bridget and Countess Elizabeth Báthory in season four of the anthology.

Vicky was chosen to play the rebellious maid who introduces Lizzie to hair dye and sex toys first.

“The way Ryan thought of it, she’s almost like a Mary Poppins that comes out of nowhere, who can be anyone from any time,” Vicky told Vanity Fair about Bridget. “Ryan said, ‘It’s women-driven, feminist, lesbian, dirty, unapologetic’.”

During filming, the show’s creator then offered her another role, as the bloodthirsty countess in the fantasy flashbacks.

“That was all shot in Italy, so we knew that that would be at the end of the schedule anyway, and we just couldn’t think of who would do it or who seemed right,” Ian explained to Tudum.

“It was Ryan’s idea. He pitched it to her and she loved it. Now it seems like such an obvious choice, but it actually came very late in the process.”

The new episodes of Monster reunited co-stars Vicky Krieps and Charlie Hunnam, who both starred in season three as Ilse Koch and Ed Gein.

Having worked together before, Vicky knew she could push Charlie in the scenes they shared.

“[We] joke a lot on set to make it fun or to just push each other in the scenes. Like, how far can we go? What can we do?” she told People at the New York City premiere last month. “We had a fight scene together, and he said, ‘You know, you can really go for it.’”

She recalled: “I’m saying, ‘But I’m really strong.’ He says, ‘That’s fine,’ and he’s really strong, so he doesn’t mind.”

Things escalated even further when Charlie fell to the floor, only for his co-star to spit on him.

“He gets up, he’s like, ‘What? What did you just do? You just spat on me. You can’t do that,’” she recalled.

A miniseries about a young girl acquitted for the hatchet murders of her father and stepmother might not sound like a natural comedy, but Ryan Murphy wanted the tone of season four to be much lighter than Monster’s previous outings.

“I felt like the tone was slightly different from [The Ed Gein Story],” Charlie told Entertainment Weekly. “It was a little more irreverent, a little more sort of bonkers, theatrical, [a] little bit more comedy, tonally than the past season that I had done. So it just felt like a fun opportunity.”

Rebecca saw her role as the villainous stepmother as a chance to unleash her comedic side.

“I’ve never played a true out-and-out villain,” she told Variety. “I just loved on the page how funny she was. It just felt like such an opportunity to be both funny and scary at the same time, which is an interesting tonal challenge.”

Director Max Winkler also confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that the show is intentionally comedic, which presented its own challenges.

“It was really challenging to make because a lot of it is comedic, with the insane way that people wrote and spoke and had expectations for women in that time period,” the Love Story director explained. “Which is not that long ago…”

He added: “1890 is so laughably insane, and the fact that there’s still some crossover to it today and that half of the internet thinks that we should go back to that way of life? It lends itself to make fun of it.”

“Sometimes the blood on my face was hand-painted with makeup brushes,” Ella told Tudum. “Sometimes it was literally poured onto me. Sometimes it came from what’s called a blood rig. So every time I would slam an axe onto the blood rig, fake blood would shoot out onto my face and body.”

Describing the process as both “realistic” and “messy”, she also shared a little behind-the-scenes hack for how they removed the blood with “a healthy dose of shaving cream”.

When blood isn’t being splattered in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the cast had puke and diarrhoea to contend with.

Most notably, the episode Strong Kitty is definitely not one for the squeamish – with Abby and Andrew Borden unknowingly sitting down for a meal of spoiled oysters, resulting in them projectile vomiting and running to the bathroom before long.

The crew spent much time and energy creating the gross scene, with director Max recalling to The Wrap: “That was a very messy, difficult day, but I am very pleased with how it turned out.

“Jack Price – our editor on that episode, was incredible in finding the musicality of it all.”

To make that gross scene as realistic as possible, they hooked Rebecca and Charlie up with subtly-disguised tubes, which the prop team filled with a disgusting orange liquid to recreate projectile vomiting.

“Rebecca has a very hard time being around vomiting and said very early that she is inclined to vomit if she’s around it,” the director explained to The Wrap. “So that was my biggest fear, protecting Rebecca.”

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he added: “Rebecca did one of the bravest things, because it’s a real thing, her thing.

“She was like shaking, so her courage to do that and to trust me… we tried to do it as quickly as possible, and it pays off because she’s so amazing in it. Intricate dinner scenes are always challenging.”

It wasn’t any easier for Charlie, who “ate the oysters that were canned because we needed them to be super big”.

“Charlie was a hero that day, but so was Rebecca,” Max said of his cast during his interview with The Wrap.

Charlie told Entertainment Weekly that he’s “kind of a germaphobe”, making the scene particularly unpleasant to film for him.

“Even if it’s fake vomit, being covered head to toe in vomit and diarrhoea for the day did not seem like a particularly enjoyable experience,” he shared. “And, indeed, it wasn’t.”

Luckily, Rebecca didn’t find it as bad as she was worried it would be.

“It was so funny and preposterous, and nothing was remotely like real vomiting, actually,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “It turned out that my biggest challenge was maintaining a straight face when the camera was on me, because I don’t think I’ve ever laughed more.”

Season four’s final moments focus on Aileen Wuornos’ execution. As she sits in the electric chair, she sees Lizzie and Maggie beckoning her towards the light.

“I always knew the last shot was going to be Aileen’s body and the curtain closing to match the ornate beautiful curtain of the fairytale version of ‘Lizzie was this crazy person!’ and then the actual reality,” director Max told The Hollywood Reporter.

Meanwhile, Ian told Tudum: “In a way, Lizzie has a happy ending, and Aileen didn’t. She didn’t get away with anything. So it felt right to land on her and give her, if not a happy ending, one that is satisfying.”

As the show concludes, I Know by Fiona Apple plays. The director explained to The Hollywood Reporter why he felt the Grammy winner’s music was perfect for that final scene.

Describing the artist as “someone else who’s been objectified for being incredible and brilliant and talented”, and had a “back turned on her for being difficult or traumatised or whatever”, Max added: “That song, that moment of an artist I admire so much helped me kind of close the loop.”

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is available to stream on Netflix now.