'Monster' Creator Ian Brennan Shares 10-Season Plan and Dives Into First Female Serial Killer Season With Wild 'Lizzie Borden Story'

Primary Journalistic Dispatch & Direct Reporting

Brennan peels back the curtain into his and Ryan Murphy's 'Monster' selection process, how they landed on the infamous female axe murderer for season four and why she's the most sympathetic subject yet of their hit Netflix true-crime anthology.

Ian Brennan describes writing the latest season of Monster , about the Lizzie Borden case, as a fever dream.

Brennan, who creates the megahit Netflix true-crime anthology with prolific producer Ryan Murphy , says writing these seasons about infamous serial killers isn't the challenge - the hard part is deciding who to make the season's subject. Once they landed on Lizzie, the eight episodes of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story just flew out of him.

In-Depth Developments & Factual Context

Ella Beatty stars as the first female lead in the hit anthology as Borden, alongside Charlie Hunnam (who portrayed Ed Gein in season three's Monster ) as her father Andrew Borden, Rebecca Hall as Lizzie's stepmother Abby Borden, and Vicky Krieps as the family's housekeeper, Bridget a.k.a Maggie. Krieps plays double duty, also as Elizabeth Bathory in flashback, and Murphy muse Sarah Paulson appears mid-season in a scene-stealing role as Aileen Wuornos, delivering what Brennan calls a triptych of serial killers to explore female rage and the "cages we put women in and the things they will do to get out of those cages."

Below, Brennan dives into the fascinating Monster -making process, explaining how he and Murphy take liberties in order to tell fuller stories, why Lizzie Borden was their most sympathetic serial killer yet, and how he and Murphy plan for 10 Monster seasons in total. "There's a hopper of three [options for next season]. It's a fairly exhaustive list, but it's tricky. You'd be surprised at how many subjects we start and then abandon," he says. "You're asking people to spend seven or eight or nine or 10 hours getting inside this person's head. They better be really interesting."

Ryan Murphy recently spoke to me about making Monster with you, and he said he loves making the anthology series because, no matter what, it's controversial and about one thing: Are monsters made, or are they born? When you two go to your Monster ideas board, how many options do you have for a season, and how did you land on Lizzie Borden for season four?

Industry Impact & Strategic Analysis

What's so interesting about the show is that it's really hard to land on one. The seasons are not hard to write. They're hard to select. The more you dig into murders and murderers, most murderers are not interesting at all; what they do is just horrible. So it ends up being a taste thing. When Ryan and I start talking about a subject and it gets its own gravity where it just feels like this thing rolling down a hill, we'll start laughing and smiling. Then we're like, "Oh, we found it."

We were trying to crack the Luigi [Mangione] story and it was just laborious and nobody knows it yet. It's still too new; unknown and esoteric. There's something not visceral about it. Then Ryan was like, "I've always wanted to do Lizzie Borden." The second he said that, I was like, "Ooh, ooh. I had not thought of this." And we'd not thought about women, because, proportionally, so few women murder. But even the most cursory discussions had that gravity where I was like, "This is gonna be good. We're gonna do it."

It very quickly became that the story we were telling was about female rage . Then we were able to develop this triptych of Elizabeth Bathory, Aileen Wuornos and Lizzie Borden [ all three women are featured in the season ], which kept the show from seeming like a stuffy, diorama piece by going through these time periods of women who were each aware of the next - Lizzie knew about Elizabeth Bathory, and Aileen Wuornos knew about Lizzie Borden. To have those three stories talk to one another made it feel much more contemporary and of the moment.

Forward Outlook & Market Perspective

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. The cages that we put women in and the things they will do to get out of those cages was really interesting. I'm so glad we did it. Now it feels so obvious like, "We should do a woman now." But it was much more organic than that. It was only afterwards that it seemed like a natural progression, but we really backed into it and I'm so glad we did.

Ryan Murphy has a deep connection with the Lizzie Borden case; he also told me that he won a choral competition in kindergarten singing the Lizzie Borden rhyme.

Being from the Midwest, he said everyone knew the rhyme growing up and he was surprised to learn that wasn't the case elsewhere. That rhyme was featured in the trailer , and also in the first episode. What was your connection to the Lizzie Borden story?

That's literally all I knew about it. I didn't know until researching it that she got away with it. That was totally news to me. I was like, "Well, that's interesting because if I don't know this, probably most people don't." There are very few historical things like that where you can spring that on an audience. At a certain point, you just have to pick. You do as much research as you can, and then you're like, "Okay, what do I think about this?" And I'm like, "Well, she definitely did it. Like, of course she did it." And it's so fascinating that it didn't even go to trial. It was a hearing, and they [the men of the jury] actually pretended they were deliberating for another 10 minutes because otherwise it was going to seem like they didn't deliberate at all. But they didn't think a woman could do that at all, which is so, so wild to me. But she was very much a blank slate in my mind. I didn't know the first thing about her.

Is that why you open the show with the murder, to make it clear that the show believes she did it?

Yes, that it wasn't going to be "did she or didn't she" do it. I guess it's similar to what we did with the Menendez brothers [in Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story ], where you need to see [the murders] first and then go back. Also, in the world of streaming, the more you can frontload, you're always encouraged to do so.

Reporting synthesized and verified under Nexvoro.tech editorial guidelines. Full primary records referenced via Google News US Entertainment.