Lizzie Borden Did Not Need a Feminist Reboot

Woke ruins everything.

I know too much about the Lizzie Borden story, so there was very little chance I would be satisfied with a Netflix version, a Ryan Murphy joint no less. Murphy’s last Monster series made the spooky homunculus Ed Gein into a sex symbol, and that already fetishized serial killers and violence, which was bad enough. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is somehow worse. Much, much worse.

I could talk about the big things the show gets wrong, really, really wrong, like basic things like the house the Bordens lived in, or how Emma Borden was Lizzie’s mother figure, not Abby Borden, her stepmother.

Like how the Irish maid, Bridget Sullivan, was allied with Abby against the two bratty daughters, Lizzie and Emma. Like how the father was the one who supposedly beheaded Lizzie’s pigeons, but that story has been debunked anyway.

Anyone interested in this case, as I have been for many years - I’ve read everything, listened to every podcast, seen every movie (all are bad) - the last place you should look is the Netflix series. Unfortunately, though, it is targeted at Gen Z, who will consume this drek, which should be given some sort of warning label or kept as far away from kids as possible.

Already, the numbers are insane, around 12 million views at the outset. But of course people will watch it out of curiosity alone. What grotesque horror will Ryan Murphy give us this time? The problem isn’t horror, although I am starting to wonder about the long-term side effects of a generation raised to see faces axed to a bloody pulp while sexualizing serial murderers.

No, the problem is that you walk away feeling absolutely nothing. Any film or television show based on Woke ideology will always end the same way because it has to. Feminism, queer sexuality, racism - we always know the ending because we know what the ending can never be.

So yes, that means Ed Gein is reimagined as a closeted transgender person and thus becomes a martyr for Queer Nation because look at what happens when you deny the identity of queer people? They kill. They torture. Yet, despite the graphic sex and violence, you’re still left with nothing. It doesn’t make you think or dig any deeper because it has no interest in the truth, not the truth of Ed Gein and not the truth of Lizzie Borden.

The sad part is that both of these stories, on their own, are horrifying. But you must be willing to tell the truth. One of the most chilling stories involving a queer-adjacent murderer is the Truman Capote masterpiece In Cold Blood, and we can see the film that won Phillip Seymour Hoffman the Oscar, Capote, which delves a little deeper into Truman Capote’s obsession with the murders at the center of his great work.

I guess we should feel lucky Ryan Murphy never exactly got his hands on In Cold Blood, though he dabbles in it with Capote vs. The Swans. I don’t think I need to see the Clutter murders intermingled with disco sex? I don’t know, call me crazy, but some things deserve to be left alone or at least to continue to scare us because, in truth, there is nothing more frightening.

But to Ryan Murphy, and the Woke writ large, all human experience now, all history, is just a blank canvas upon which to paint their reimagined masterpiece of what their utopia might look like. So, Lizzie Borden becomes an innocent closet lesbian whose cruel stepmother and father deserved to die so that Lizzie could live her life as a free woman, an independent woman, not condemned by society as an old maid.

Ah, but the truth is so much more interesting. Who was she really? She wasn’t pretty, that’s for sure. She was portly and not, you know, the daughter of Annette Bening and Warren Beatty? I mean, I get it; people like to look at hot people, which is why Sissy Spacek starred as Carrie and why Lizzie Borden has always been played by someone very pretty. Okay, fine, but we can still stick to the facts, more or less.

And if all that mess isn’t enough—bad acting, bad writing, bad directing, clumsy use of too much blood and violence, yet another affair with the Irish maid—for whatever reason, Sarah Paulson shows up as Aileen Wuornos. Yeah, because they want us to believe she'd been obsessed with Lizzie Borden and gone to the bed-and-breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts, even though Wuornos was captured before it even existed.

Why? Because Ryan Murphy loves Sarah Paulson, so she had to be written into the story. By the way, this absolute catastrophe is an irritatingly nepo-baby project, directed by Max Winkler - you know, the son of The Fonz? It stars the Bening/Beatty spawn and Carrie Fisher’s daughter. It feels very like the Royal Court before the revolution, doesn’t it? If only.

What then must we do? Nothing. There is nothing we can do. We could try to assemble a group of angry ladies to scold Netflix and Hollywood into implementing some kind of decency standard - you know, like the Hays Code? If anything makes the case for a return to those days, it’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story. If, for no other reason, having decency standards will force them to write better scripts.

But we’re caught in a weird time warp where the Left and Hollywood have become puritanical in their beliefs yet extreme in their expressions of queer sexuality. No holds barred. Anything goes, and the characters will always be elevated, no matter their terrible behavior. Their identity decides their fate.

This version of Lizzie Borden wasn’t supposed to stick to the facts. Instead, the filmmakers said, it would be a “fever dream.” It’s more like what happens when you run out of good stories to tell. You’re stuck with sensationalism - extreme gore and bizarre sex. And when I say bizarre sex, I mean Aileen Wuornos shows up with her butch girlfriend, and they get it on, sort of, on the Lizzie Borden murder couch.

The problem with making art in the extreme in Hollywood now is that there is no baseline of “normal” to bounce off of. That baseline of normal has to be the status quo for something as bizarre as this to have any sort of cultural impact beyond making narcissistic, self-pitying young lesbian-adjacent feminists on TikTok feel seen.

The Lizzie Borden case has been obsessing women like me for decades. It’s mostly women, though some of the Borden scholars are men. What’s fascinating about it is the tight timeline of the murders, how they were spaced over an hour apart, how Abby was killed first, and how Lizzie managed to not have any blood on her anywhere.

For years, the mystery has eluded us, and that’s the only real way to tell this story, as a mystery, not filled in with all of the fantasmagoria of Woke America in 2026. But what does it matter? I don’t matter to Hollywood. They get the views. Younger people don’t know the difference. Art isn’t really meant to illuminate or even to entertain. Instead, it’s become yet another tool to express one’s political ideology or chosen victim status on social media.

I would love it if someday someone told the Lizzie Borden story and did it justice. Sadly, I may not live long enough to see it.