📌 In This Deep Dive
The fourth season of Netflix’s Monsters reframes the historical crimes of Lizzie Borden, Elizabeth Báthory, and Aileen Wuornos into a unified feminist narrative centered on patriarchal resistance. While Aileen Wuornos’s documented trauma provides a real foundation for this thematic angle, the series relies on fictionalized connections to link the earlier figures. This analysis explores where true history ends and creative mythmaking begins, examining how the show transforms distinct true-crime cases into a broader reflection on female rage and systemic justice.
The fourth installment of Netflix’s Monsters anthology is stirring up plenty of debate, but given how it was conceived this time around, that was almost bound to happen. For the season focused on Lizzie Borden, Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy decided to push well past the true story and verified facts. Instead, they present a heavily dramatized version of events, one where Lizzie’s guilt is treated as a given and the murders take place with the help of the housemaid, Maggie. Which, as we’ll see, was never actually proven.
But it goes even further than that. The series frames Lizzie Borden’s story as a broader symbol of how women have always had to navigate the world. To drive that point home, two other famous female serial killers make regular appearances: Aileen Wuornos from modern American history, and the Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory, who lived between the 16th and 17th centuries. It’s a deliberate choice, and through it, the creators are sending a specific message: when a woman commits murder, there’s always a very distinct root cause tied directly to her place in society.
Looking into the differences between the Netflix portrayal of Lizzie Borden and the actual history behind all three women helps make sense of those creative decisions. Every time Monsters shows us something that isn’t backed by cold, hard facts, it’s trying to make a very deliberate point.
Lizzie, Elizabeth & Aileen: Murder to regain control
In the way the Netflix series frames them, Lizzie Borden, Elizabeth Báthory, and Aileen Wuornos are three female killers who acted with deliberate intent, seeing murder as an inevitable reaction to the role society assigned them. To be clear, once again: many of these aspects are heavily dramatized in the show, so these parallels reflect the series’ underlying message rather than historical facts.
According to the show, Elizabeth murdered young women because she felt the heavy weight of her fading youth, knowing that becoming an aging countess would diminish her standing in a world where power was everything. Bathing in the blood of all those virgins seemed like a practical solution for a woman clinging to her authority. Lizzie Borden, on the other hand, represents a woman humiliated and mistreated by her own family with no way to defend herself: killing her parents becomes her only way out of the cage her life had become. Aileen Wuornos shares that same core realization with Lizzie, feeling constantly violated by a male-dominated society. Standing alone against the world with no other weapons at her disposal, she sees no choice but to target the men she holds responsible for the subjugation of women.
Three figures from entirely different social classes—Elizabeth representing high-born power, Lizzie the middle class, and Aileen the most vulnerable lower strata of society—who, according to the show, actually end up inspiring one another. In this fourth season of Monster, each woman is driven to something as brutal as murder because her circumstances leave no other way out. There was simply no other path for Elizabeth to preserve her youth, for Lizzie to escape her parents’ abuse, or for Aileen to strike back against a lifetime of social subjugation. It was their way of trying to claw back some form of control over the trajectory of their lives.
Three examples of women facing deeply unfair realities, resorting to extreme acts because their conditions offered no alternative. And within the show’s logic, their stories serve as inspiration for those who come after, almost held up as examples of courage: rebelling against the female condition demands an iron will, and those who showed it in the past always have something to teach.
The parallel, however, is built in the Netflix series using elements that don’t always align with the actual facts of their lives. That is why it becomes so crucial to separate genuine history from what has been pulled from theories, folklore, and outside interpretations. Placing these three women on the same existential wavelength reveals less about who they really were, and far more about how history and culture have viewed them over time.
Monsters – The Lizzie Borden Story: The differences between the Netflix series and the true story
Lizzie Borden: guilt was essential
The single most important point to highlight about how Monsters handles Lizzie Borden’s story on Netflix comes down to her guilt: the show presents the facts as absolute certainty, showing us Lizzie killing her parents with an axe, but in real life that was never actually proven. The trial ended with Lizzie Borden’s acquittal, and while no alternative theory was ever confirmed either, there was simply never enough evidence to prove Lizzie was responsible.
Naturally, portraying Lizzie as the one responsible for the murders was a necessary piece of the message the series wanted to convey, leaving zero doubt in the viewer’s mind about her guilt. And if Lizzie really was the one who killed her parents, the involvement of the maid Maggie (born Bridget Sullivan) becomes almost a given: in real life, there was never any proof of a romantic relationship between them, but rumors about Lizzie’s sexuality were well known, making it easy to frame Maggie’s participation as something driven by her feelings.
In the real case, Maggie’s testimony turned out to be crucial to Lizzie’s acquittal. The two of them were the only people in the house at the time of the murders, meaning that if Lizzie actually was the killer, Maggie’s story had to be fabricated to cover for her. As the show illustrates, Lizzie’s account of events shifted constantly, and watching her story change over and over was precisely what convinced so many people of her guilt. That is why the famous nursery rhyme caught on later on, effectively turning Lizzie into the town’s ultimate boogeyman, and if you take her guilt for granted, it feels only natural to assume Maggie was the accomplice who helped her pull it off.
In reality, no definitive proof of Lizzie’s guilt was ever found, and even though no alternative theory held up particularly well either, there was no way for a jury to reach a conviction. Lizzie’s demeanor during the trial definitely played a role, and her fainting spell when presented with her parents’ skulls made a lasting impression on the jurors. Beyond that, the general consensus at the time was simply that a woman couldn’t possibly commit a crime that brutal. There is also zero proof that Lizzie and Maggie stayed in touch after the murders: Maggie actually went on to marry her employer in Montana, making the show’s scenes depicting an ongoing secret relationship purely speculative.
Within the logic of Monsters, it wasn’t enough for Lizzie to just be guilty, her motive had to stem directly from her parents’ abuse. Alternative theories suggest Lizzie killed her parents after being caught in an intimate moment with Maggie, but that wouldn’t support the framing of Lizzie as a victim of the broader violence women faced in that society. Even Maggie’s potential involvement could easily be explained as simple devotion to the person paying her wages, but a romantic spark obviously works much better on screen. The friction between Lizzie and her parents is backed up by multiple contemporary testimonies, and her uncle John Morse’s visit is historical fact as well: he rarely had contact with the family, yet happened to sleep in that house the night right before the murders.
What the Netflix series needed, though, was a woman victimized by her own parents, for whom murder was the only possible way out. And the other two female killers featured in the show share a very similar narrative framing, even if it isn’t necessarily grounded in real facts.
Elizabeth Báthory and the legend of the blood
Unlike the other two killers in question, Elizabeth Báthory was anything but a victim of the world. The Netflix series leans heavily into one of the biggest legends surrounding her: the idea that she murdered young local women because she needed virgin blood to rejuvenate her skin. The whole blood bath aspect, though, was just local folklore that emerged over a century after the countess died. In classic literature, that exact strain of folklore eventually inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the late 19th century.
In real life, there is no historical trace of any blood baths. The truth is that Elizabeth Báthory killed out of pure sadism: she was already a wealthy landowner, and she used her position of power to drag her servants into helping her carry out a string of horrific murders. Her actions were so hard to reconcile with the image of a powerful noblewoman that years later, theories emerged suggesting the entire case was actually a political conspiracy to condemn her and seize her vast estates: her wealth gave her enemies plenty of motivation to join forces and bring her down.
However, the sheer volume of testimony proving the countess’s sadism was simply too large to write off as a coordinated conspiracy. Many of those accounts came from men working directly under her who could no longer stomach the atrocities happening inside the castle. The acts described included torture with needles, knives, and red-hot irons, along with mutilation and deaths caused by freezing, starvation, and dehydration. When all is said and done, Elizabeth Báthory stands as one of the most prolific serial killers in history, with some estimates putting her body count somewhere around 300.
It is hard to frame acts like these as an inevitable response to the oppression of women. Even so, Netflix’s Monsters uses the myths surrounding her figure to construct a defensive, revenge-driven motive for Elizabeth Báthory. There was the legend that Elizabeth had been assaulted by a local peasant and had her newborn taken away at birth, alongside the myth of the blood baths and her obsession with staying young. None of this is grounded in proven history, but it served the show’s creators by establishing a thematic bridge to Lizzie Borden’s situation. To young Lizzie, Countess “Elizabetta” becomes a woman who successfully struck back against a world that mistreated her, showing the nerve to act with a ruthless violence nobody expected from a woman.
To bring things full circle, books documenting Elizabeth Báthory’s life actually did exist during Lizzie Borden’s era, published primarily in Europe. So the idea that the maid Maggie (who was born in Ireland in real life) gave her that book is technically possible from a historical timeline standpoint, but highly improbable. The idea that Lizzie had any knowledge of Elizabeth Báthory’s crimes is a theory invented for the first time by Netflix’s Monsters, unsupported by any documented fact.
Aileen Wuornos: Hating the world enough to want it dead
Out of the three killers featured in the fourth season of Monsters, Aileen Wuornos is probably the one who best fits the image of a victim of a hostile world. She was abandoned by her parents when she was just three years old and raised by her maternal grandparents, both of whom were alcoholics. Her grandfather was violent toward her, and allegations of sexual abuse within the home were entirely plausible. In fact, legal records confirm that Aileen was raped at age 14 by a family friend, and was subsequently forced to give up her baby for adoption right after birth.
From this perspective, Aileen Wuornos’s true story actually mirrors the legend surrounding Elizabeth Báthory. Aileen really was a child with a horrific upbringing who was kicked out of her house at 15. At that age, with nobody to rely on, sex work became her only means of survival, and it is easy to imagine how many violent men she crossed paths with under those circumstances. Her first murder, the one shown in Monsters, involved a client who actually had a prior conviction for attempted rape, making Aileen’s long-standing claim of self-defense genuinely plausible. Yet at her trial, the judge refused to admit her victim’s criminal record as relevant evidence, and psychiatric assessments diagnosing her with borderline and antisocial personality disorders did nothing to help her: she received a death sentence for that very first murder.
In the bigger picture, however, Aileen’s other six murders likely happened before those men ever became violent with her. Her statements on the matter were constantly conflicting, and even though she always painted those men as violent abusers who were actively attacking her, she admitted on several occasions that she shot them before any real violence took place. Ultimately, Aileen lived an existence so steeped in trauma and pain that she developed an understandable hatred for all of humanity. The words that sum her up best are the ones she used herself when she shut down all further legal appeals in 2001: “I killed those men, and I’d do it again, too. I’m not crazy, I’m sane and competent. I’m just someone who seriously hates human life and would kill again.”
Not exactly a sadist who took pleasure in other people’s suffering, though. Aileen was the victim of a cruel world, completely lacking the tools to cope with the relentless abuse pushed onto her. Hating the world, for someone in her shoes, was practically inevitable, and turning to extreme acts like murder became a byproduct of the trauma she endured from a young age. The feminist angle introduced by Monsters, framing Aileen Wuornos as someone fed up with how society treated women, serves as the narrative bridge back to Lizzie Borden, or at least to the version of her depicted in the show.
Here again, there is no evidence that Aileen Wuornos was actually inspired by Lizzie Borden’s crimes, let alone that she ever visited her house. Drawing a parallel between the two and framing Aileen’s actions as a defense against predatory men shifts her murders into the realm of retaliation. Out of the three, though, Aileen is the one where this framing feels most grounded in reality: while the abuse suffered by Elizabeth Báthory and Lizzie Borden remains debatable and open to context, the fact that Aileen Wuornos was a repeated victim of violence, humiliation, and deep hostility is documented fact. Her murders weren’t calculated acts of revenge so much as an involuntary byproduct of a brutal reality she had no other way of handling.
Her death sentence by lethal injection and those chilling final words we hear her speak in the series belong to the real history of Aileen Wuornos. Beyond that, her character was used by the show to give weight to its central thesis: that all three killers were simply acting in defense against what society had forced upon them.
The Feminist Narrative of Monsters Season 4
So the fourth chapter of Monsters focusing on Lizzie Borden shouldn’t be treated like a documentary trying to lay out the real facts. Even more than in previous seasons, this installment relies on deliberate assumptions, intentional omissions, and dramatic reinterpretations, all designed to frame the protagonist’s actions as acts of revenge against the oppressive conditions forced upon her.
And to push that narrative even further, the season ties Lizzie Borden to two other historical female killers, Elizabeth Báthory and Aileen Wuornos, weaving them all into a single thematic thread that portrays them as women striking back against the abuse they endured. But overall, the message the show delivers is very much a product of deliberate creative choices, staying pretty far removed from the actual history of the people involved.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, the series is inspired by the real lives and documented crimes of historical figures—specifically Lizzie Borden, Elizabeth Báthory, and Aileen Wuornos. However, while the individual cases are rooted in history, the series takes substantial creative license by weaving their distinct timelines together to serve its central narrative themes.
No. The three women lived in completely different eras and geographic locations: Báthory in 16th-century Hungary, Borden in late 19th-century Massachusetts, and Wuornos in late 20th-century Florida. Any direct narrative crossover or thematic connection between them in the show is entirely a creative production choice.
Historically, Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted for the 1892 murders of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts. She was never legally found guilty, and no one else was ever charged with the crimes, leaving the case officially unsolved despite widespread cultural speculation regarding her guilt.
Wuornos’s documented background of severe childhood abuse, systemic neglect, and survival as a sex worker provides the most historically grounded element of the season. The show draws directly from her recorded life history, though it elevates certain events to mirror the broader feminist commentary of the series.
Rather than offering a standard step-by-step true-crime retelling, the series uses these iconic figures to examine how patriarchal control, institutional abuse, and social isolation have historically pushed women to violent extremes, transforming their individual cases into a broader myth of female revenge.
