Netflix’s Monster and America’s Growing Obsession With Serial Killers

Netflix’s Monster has a new face. The anthology recently released its fourth installment, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, starring Ella Beatty as Borden. Borden joins a gallery that includes Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein, with co-creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan already eyeing the next monsters. The names under discussion include the BTK strangler Dennis Rader, Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, and Luigi Mangione. The new season plants its own sequel bait. Sarah Paulson surfaces as Aileen Wuornos, a murderer born six decades after Borden’s trial, while fantasy sequences summon Elizabeth Báthory, the Hungarian countess accused of torturing servant girls to death in the 1600s. Charlie Hunnam, last season’s Ed Gein, returns as Lizzie’s father. Marvel has its repertory players and its crossover cameos; now, so does murder.

The commercial logic is undeniable. The Dahmer season surpassed a billion viewing hours and sits comfortably in Netflix’s all-time top ten. Critics loathed the Gein season and audiences pushed it to number one anyway, in more than sixty countries. Edison’s Q2 2026 data has true crime displacing comedy as America’s most popular podcast topic for the first time. So whether the Borden season is any good is beside the point. The audience was there before it aired, and will be there for whoever comes next.

When we value authenticity for the sake of authenticity, we end up with a culture that builds shrines to cold-blooded killers, and the trend incurs a cost.

The fascination spilled off the screen long ago, and an odd angle of romanticism came with it. Plenty of people, if you dare ask, now have a “favorite” serial killer. When the Dahmer season premiered, so many people went looking for Dahmer costumes that eBay started scrubbing the listings. As for Borden, you can buy her as an action figure or play her crime as a board game, and the Fall River house where Andrew and Abby Borden were hacked to death now operates as a bed-and-breakfast, complete with ghost tours and Victorian tea parties.

All of this can be waved off as morbid curiosity. Netflix’s own synopsis for the Borden season makes that harder. The killings, it promises, give birth to an icon who breaks out of her cage and writes her own legend: “shocking, monstrous, and gloriously free.” We are meant to read taking an axe to your family as a liberation story. Netflix is betting we will. That bet reveals something worse than curiosity: a deepening malaise in how we understand individualism and authenticity.

Most true-crime fans want a puzzle to solve or a scare to enjoy, and there is nothing sinister in that. Curiosity about criminals is natural, particularly toward those who exhibit complete and utter disregard for society’s norms. Carl Jung gave the impulse a name. The shadow, which he developed in his 1951 Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, is the compartment of the unconscious where we store what we cannot admit about ourselves: repressed desires, instincts, appetites, failures. Everything incompatible with our self-image goes in. But it does not stay put. Jung argued that the shadow surfaces in dreams and, more often, in our judgments of other people. What we cannot stand in others is frequently what we refuse to see in ourselves.

When it comes to our perception of criminals, this projection can go one of two ways. We may recoil from criminals because we sense the same capacity in ourselves, faintly and shamefully, and want no part of it. Or we may condemn them for doing what we have only ever wanted to do. Implicit in the second reaction is a strain of envy. When we hear about some guy who shot his boss, or some mastermind who executed a sophisticated bank heist, we express our indignation, but we may also feel something underneath it: a recognition that we would never dare do something like that because, well, we don’t have the nerve.

Envy of that kind, fed by decades of intensifying individualism, curdles into admiration. Individualism holds that you, the individual, come first. And you should be able to pursue whatever it is you desire with minimal-to-no interference from the state or any other collective. Its hypertrophied form makes authenticity the dominant cultural currency. Be yourself, express yourself, stick it to the man, whatever tradition, authority, or human nature might have to say. In that market, the most transgressive criminals become idols. After all, who is more authentic than a debased serial killer? The more people he kills, and the more twisted the method, the more total his contempt for every legal and social expectation. Bundy and Dahmer were vicious — no doubt about it. Still, few men have lived out their private appetites so completely, or cared so little about who paid the price.

Monster is this logic rendered as prestige television. Brennan describes each season as an invitation to spend eight hours inside the subject’s head, and the franchise furnishes the trip with lavish budgets, award-winning leads, and the full auteur biopic treatment. Evan Peters won a Golden Globe for playing Dahmer. Beatty, daughter of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, is Hollywood royalty. The creators insist that each season indicts the culture that produces such people. The Dahmer season did dedicate a full episode to one victim’s life and ended with the victims’ names before the credits rolled. But intent goes only so far when the name we remember is the killer’s. The effect, season by season, is the assembly of an American pantheon of transgression, in which the qualifying credential is the willingness to violate everything.

Of course, this kind of authenticity is of a particular flavor, for authenticity of a different temper has its virtues. There is undeniable value in embracing a high degree of authenticity in society. From idiosyncratic talent producing transformative scientific breakthroughs to one-of-a-kind artists constructing our most iconic cultural touchstones, capitalizing on individuals’ unique and innate qualities is a tremendous gift; it is, in great part, what makes the West so prosperous. Instead of forcing stringent, debilitating conformity, we recognize that dynamism and innovation depend on granting individuals a healthy degree of personal expression and exploration. Individualism, practiced in a tempered manner, does not have to end in the mainstream admiration of people who kill and torture others to get off.

What keeps it in check is what Charles Taylor calls a “horizon of significance.” From The Malaise of Modernity:

Defining myself means finding what is significant in my difference from others. I may be the only person with exactly 3,732 hairs on my head, or be exactly the same height as some tree on the Siberian plain, but so what? If I begin to say that I define myself by my ability to articulate important truths, or play the Hammerklavier like no one else, or revive the tradition of my ancestors, then we are in the domain of recognizable self-definitions.

Difference means nothing on its own. It becomes significant only against a horizon the self did not invent: truth, art, a tradition, the good of others. An opinion adopted for the provocation it delivers, cruelty relabeled as honesty, a father who leaves his kids on a Tuesday and calls it a journey toward his real self: all of it reads as cool and authentic, but none of it is significant — transgression performed for its own sake. It is vice with a brand attached. But real authenticity is not an end in itself; it is a means to something better.

The Monster franchise all but inverts Taylor’s horizon, and the new season shows how completely. Brennan describes it as a triptych of Borden, Aileen Wuornos, and Elizabeth Báthory — three women spread across three centuries and joined by nothing but transgression. The synopsis cast the murders as the birth of a free woman. Free for what, exactly? Free to buy a mansion on the hill, rename herself Lizbeth, and spend 34 years as a pariah in Fall River. Borden does not interest the show because she articulated important truths or contributed to the state of women in society. She interests the show because she (allegedly) swung it. By Taylor’s measure, her distinction means no more than 3,732 hairs; it just comes with two bodies. Her own century treated her as a puzzle and a scandal; the schoolyard rhyme made her a bogeyman. Ours has made her an icon.

When we value authenticity for the sake of authenticity, we end up with a culture that builds shrines to cold-blooded killers, and the trend incurs a cost. It may very well hurt the families of the victims. (Relatives of Dahmer’s victims said exactly this when the first season aired.) It may very well encourage the behavior itself. Or it may precipitate a violent, disproportionate pendulum swing in the opposite direction: draconian crackdowns on expressions of individuality that forget authenticity’s virtues altogether. For all of these reasons, and for the simple fact that we should not worship sadistic psychopaths in any shape or form, we ought to anchor authenticity within, and in relation to, some greater end: the advancement of the arts and sciences, the cultivation of virtue, the tangible good of people other than ourselves.

Six more monsters are coming; the audience is plainly there. Whether they arrive as cautionary tales or as icons of authenticity is not up to Netflix. It is up to us.

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Yaniv Regev studies democratic governance at Georgetown University and writes on the institutions, pathologies, and ideas that hold liberal democracy together — or don’t.