“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This newspaperman’s maxim from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance might well be the mission statement for Netflix‘s Monster, Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy’s anthology show about America’s most infamous murderers. Its stories of Jeffrey Dahmer, Lyle and Erik Menendez, Ed Gein, and now Lizzie Borden use the facts of these cases as a skeleton, sure. But as the umbrella title indicates, the show is more concerned with the creation of monsters —  both how these figures came to see themselves as monstrous and commit monstrous acts, and how they filled the role of monster in popular culture, reflecting the interests and prejudices of the culture that gave birth to them.

The facts are important. The legend is the story. Why else open the show with an old-fashioned iris out on a stage curtain, which parts to reveal a toy piano playing the “Lizzie Borden took an axe” schoolyard rhyme all on its own? The story of Lizzie Borden you are about to see is just that: a story about both a person and the idea of that person, one that calls attention to the artifice of its own construction. It’s like Velvet Goldmine for murderesses.

A cold open sets the stakes. It depicts Lizzie Borden (Ella Beatty) doing what we all came here to see her do: whacking first her stepmother Abby (Rebecca Hall), then her father Andrew (Charlie Hunnam), with an axe, over and over and over, largely not seen but heard in what can only be described as a masterpiece of foley art. 

After a new Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story logo treatment — it’s in studious handwritten cursive now — and some epigrams about whether or not a woman would be capable of murder, we see what life was like for Lizzie and her parents before murders. Lizzie gets mommy-dommed into a corset by Abby, who watches with dismay as Lizzie’s severe menstrual flow ruins an already disastrous visit from a suitor. He recoiled from Lizzie’s “horse face” long before she bled all over Abby’s prize fainting couch. (Actor Ella Beatty has the kind of freakish, alien beauty that could pass for unattractive to the very dull, I suppose.)

While Abby emotionally abuses both Lizzie and the Irish help, Mr. Borden keeps busy as a woodworker and craftsman, whose primary business is the coffin trade. He selects axes from his much beloved, ridiculously expansive collection (seriously, this would put Gimli the Dwarf to shame) to chop up corpses that don’t fit what he’s got on offer. He’s not of much use to Lizzie, that’s for sure. 

(To her credit, however, Lizzie regards both her parents sympathetically. She seems to feel for Andrew for the loss of his beloved wife at a young age, and for Abby for taking on the task of raising his children and descending into alcoholic depression over her inability to do so.)

Enter Bridget (Vicky Krieps), or Maggie, as Mrs. Borden racistly insists on calling her. This Irish-German free spirit has traveled the continent before arriving in America, and brings with her all kinds of interesting ideas. She colors her hair. She stands up for her right to be paid for her work and to maintain some semblance of independence. She’s saving money to buy a house and land of her own…and she’s earning extra by fucking Mr. Borden, as well as cleaning his axe collection.

But she has a far more instant, sincere, even primal connection with a different Borden: Lizzie. Bridget “meets” her when she hovers her face inches from the younger woman’s menstrual blood as she cleans it from Abby’s fainting couch. While the Runaways’ “Cherry Bomb” blasts, Lizzie watches this weirdly erotic ritual, eyes widening at the sight of Bridget’s exposed stockings and garters. It’s gay as hell.

If you weren’t already getting that message, the episode (directed by Max Winkler from a script by creator and showrunner Brennan) indulges in a full-scale Heavenly Creatures homage, riffing on Peter Jackson’s surreal, sapphic tale of murderous folie à deux both visually and thematically. 

The blossoming friendship-love-obsession between the two women reaches its apotheosis among the literal blossoms of the cherry trees that are Lizzie’s pride and joy. Winkler films them like a hybrid of Jackson’s rapturous camera in Heavenly Creatures and his fellow antipodean Peter Weir’s more stately, dreamy one in Picnic at Hanging Rock, another story of young women’s desires sublimated into horror. (There’s shades, and more than shades, of Sofia Coppola in there as well.)

Bridget gives Lizzie two major gifts in this episode. The first is a proto-vibrator that works with a hand crank like a pepper grinder, which it resembles. (That, or the post of a bannister.) The invention looks ludicrous, and its prescribed purpose — to ease Lizzie’s menstrual flow by inducing “hysterical paroxysm,” or orgasm — is a comically discredited theory that is largely a product of modern imaginations rather than the historical record anyway. She tests the device out on Lizzie’s hand, allowing her imagination, and ours, to extrapolate from there. Bridget’s cheerful directness throughout the scene is hot as hell.

But things tilt over to horror in a big way before long. Bridget’s other present for Lizzie is a book about Elizabeth Báthory (also played by Krieps), the so-called Countess of Blood. A proto–serial killer, an important touchstone for the modern vampire myth, and a rare example of a super-famous woman murderer, Elizabeth allegedly bathed in the blood of virgins abducted from the local peasantry to maintain her beauty. With makeup and costuming straight out of the Eiko Ishioka playbook, the Countess, her creepy trio of handmaidens, and their scary black-hooded executioners slaughter up a steaming tub of blood for which Lizzie is left pining. 

So she recreates it as best she can, with cherry juice, in a bath in the middle of her dovecote, while Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love” blasts. In an image straight out of Heavenly Creatures, the two women bathe in it together. “If only this were blood,” Bridget says.

That last line sums up the Monster ethos in many ways. Brennan’s topic is (cue Iggy Pop) our lust for death — our libidinal interest in famous killers and the lurid details of their crimes. It complicates this by also shoving us deep into the pain from which these crimes emerged, and which they caused. There are grim episodes of Dahmer and Mendendez in particular that I’ll never forget, while Gein is as extreme as I’ve ever seen a mainstream hit TV show get.

This hybrid approach — toy pianos and vampire countesses on one hand, the utterly bleak lack of freedom afforded to women like Lizzie on the other — is not for everyone. I see how it can read as glib and disrespectful. But I think its project is unique on TV, and vital for understanding the fascination the worst in us exudes on the rest of us. 

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.