How Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story taps into our obsession with women who kill

If you’ve recently binged Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, you’ll probably have noticed one particularly unsettling theme: We really cannot get enough of women who kill.

Via Netflix

True crime has become a massive part of our streaming queues and podcast charts, but stories about female killers seem to have a particular hold over us. From Lizzie Borden to Aileen Wuornos, women accused of murder have become some of the most recognisable names in true crime.

There’s a reason Monster chose Lizzie Borden as its latest subject. Her 1892 trial, in which she was accused of murdering her wealthy father and stepmother with an axe, remains one of America’s most famous and hotly debated criminal cases.

For showrunners Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, putting a woman at the centre of the latest Monster series also opened up a much bigger conversation about female rage, repression and the way society reacts when women become violent.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Brennan explained that female killers were not initially the focus of the anthology.

via Netflix

“We’d not thought about women, because, proportionally, so few women murder. It very quickly became that the story we were telling was about female rage.”

That eventually led the creators to build what Brennan described as a “triptych” around Elizabeth Báthory, Aileen Wuornos and Lizzie Borden.

“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.”

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And that idea of women who kill being seen as an anomaly is key to understanding why their stories can feel so particularly shocking.

Psychologist Marissa Harrison told Penn State University: “Because women are culturally coded as safe and nurturing, a female predator weaponizes that exact trust. When a caregiver like Jane Toppan murders patients, it forces a jarring confrontation with how evil can hide behind a comforting facade.”

Basically, the stereotype that women are naturally caring, maternal and non-threatening can make their violence feel even more disturbing when that expectation is shattered.

Via Netflix

Female murderers have also historically been more likely to commit crimes within roles where people already trusted them, including as nurses, caregivers or mothers. That can make the eventual revelation feel like an especially grim betrayal of the role they were expected to play.

There’s also a long history of female killers being overlooked or understood differently from their male counterparts.

That disconnect is part of what makes women like Lizzie Borden such enduring figures in true crime. The fascination is the clash between the version of womanhood society expects and what happens when someone completely breaks from it.

Monster is clearly interested in exactly that tension, using Lizzie’s story to look beyond one infamous murder case and into the much bigger idea of what happens when women are allowed to be angry, violent and, ultimately, frightening.

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Featured image via Netflix