If you’ve started watching Ryan Murphy’s “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story” and found yourself doing a double take at Sarah Paulson’s Aileen Wuornos wandering through a series set in 1892 Fall River, you’re not imagining things — and the show isn’t being subtle about it either. Wuornos, the real-life Florida serial killer convicted of murdering seven men and executed by lethal injection in 2002, appears throughout the season as a kind of ghostly parallel to Lizzie, at one point even introducing herself to a victim as “Lizzie Borden.” She’s shown reading up on the Borden case, visiting the actual house, and treating Lizzie as something like a patron saint for women who finally struck back against the men controlling their lives.
Although the two women lived 100 years apart, Wuornos is written into the show as a deliberate, non-historical device. There’s no historical record that the real Aileen Wuornos ever knew who Lizzie Borden was, and the show isn’t claiming otherwise. Co-creator Ian Brennan has been upfront that the pairing is a deliberate creative device, not a factual claim. He told People the idea was to put 1893 — an era when a jury could barely fathom a “respectable” woman swinging an axe — directly next to a century later, when a woman who killed men really was convicted and executed for it. “That’s why when Aileen Wuornos comes into the show, that contrast comes in much clearer,” Brennan said. “What is the Lizzie of our world? How is she treated? And how does she lash out?”
The effect, Brennan says, is to sharpen the show’s throughline about female rage and how society treats women who fight back. Ella Beatty, who plays Lizzie, has described the connective tissue between the two women — and Elizabeth Báthory, who also appears this season — as a “legacy of female rage” running through the show. Brennan has also said the two women’s fates are framed differently on purpose: Lizzie gets a kind of escape by the end of the series, while Wuornos never did in real life, which is why the show gives her a spectral send-off alongside Lizzie rather than leaving her out entirely.
As for how Paulson ended up playing a serial killer stitched into a story about a 19th-century axe murder case, she’s said she didn’t even read the script before signing on. She told Variety Australia last December that she’ll jump at almost any chance “to get inside something that has been predetermined by society and have a little look at it through my own particular lens” — which, given the character, tracks.
