Where Was Monster Season 4 Filmed? All Filming Locations Explained

Lizzie Borden took an axe. Ryan Murphy took a camera crew to three different countries. The fourth season of Netflix’s hit true-crime anthology Monster is one of the most ambitious productions the franchise has ever attempted. And if you’ve been wondering exactly where the blood-soaked Victorian drama was brought to life, you’re in the right place.

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story premieres globally on Netflix on September 17, 2026. It tells the story of Lizzie Borden, the Massachusetts woman accused and ultimately acquitted of brutally axe-murdering her father and stepmother in 1892. Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan didn’t just want to recreate one town. They went coast to coast, and then all the way to Europe.

Here’s a complete breakdown of every confirmed filming location for Monster Season 4.

Monster Season 4 Filming Locations at a Glance

Los Angeles, California

Principal photography began here in September 2025, just days after Season 3 (The Ed Gein Story) dropped on Netflix. The city served as the primary production base all the way through March 2026.

Don’t let the sunny California backdrop fool you. LA has a remarkable ability to double as Victorian-era New England and production designers clearly put that to work here.

Behind-the-scenes photos from October 2025 showed cast members in full period costumes walking the streets of Los Angeles, with the crew working to transform the surroundings into Fall River, Massachusetts, circa 1892.

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LA’s historic neighborhoods are no strangers to this kind of transformation. The Angelino Heights district, for example, is home to some of the city’s best-preserved Victorian-era architecture. Streets lined with ornate 1880s and 1890s houses have appeared in productions like Charmed and multiple period horror films. The area’s architectural bones made it a natural fit for a show set in that exact era.

Meanwhile, the Bradbury Building in Downtown LA, built in 1893, the very same year Lizzie Borden stood trial remains one of the city’s most iconic filming locations. Its wrought-iron staircases and glass-ceiling atrium have appeared in countless period productions, from Blade Runner to 500 Days of Summer.

Paramount Pictures Studios on Melrose Avenue is another likely contributor. The studio’s legendary backlot spans 65 acres with over 30 soundstages. Productions like this one regularly use its controlled interior sets to recreate domestic spaces that would be nearly impossible to shoot on location.

The production carries an estimated budget of $5–7 million per episode – a figure that allowed the team to build remarkably detailed period sets right in the heart of Hollywood.

Other Productions Filmed in Los Angeles’ Victorian Locations

Chicago, Illinois

Chicago was confirmed as a filming location once the full production picture came into focus. Scenes were shot here during the later phases of the production window, between late 2025 and early 2026.

What role did the Windy City play? The show’s multi-era storyline offers some clues. Monster Season 4 isn’t just a simple 1892 period drama. It also features Sarah Paulson as Aileen Wuornos, the Florida serial killer executed in 2002. The show uses Wuornos and reportedly also Countess Elizabeth Báthory to draw a thematic thread connecting centuries of female rage and societal oppression.

Chicago’s architecture spans multiple eras. It was rebuilt largely after the Great Fire of 1871, giving it an enormous stock of late-19th and early-20th century buildings. Neighborhoods like Prairie Avenue and Pullman contain Victorian mansions from the 1880s–1900s. The city’s later 20th-century streets could also plausibly stand in for Florida locales connected to Wuornos’s timeline.

Chicago’s track record as a filming city is stellar. It has hosted productions like The Dark Knight, Transformers: Age of Extinction, and Divergent — all of which used its dense architectural variety and diverse street grid to stand in for multiple locations simultaneously. For Monster Season 4, the city likely served a similar multi-purpose role.

Other Productions Filmed in Chicago

Rome, Italy

This is where Monster Season 4 gets genuinely unexpected. The production traveled all the way to Rome, Italy, with filming running from January 22, 2026 to approximately February 25, 2026.

Why Italy? Creator Ryan Murphy revealed that Season 4 isn’t purely about Lizzie Borden. It weaves in the story of Countess Elizabeth Báthory, the 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman allegedly responsible for the torture and murder of hundreds of young women.

Often called the most prolific female serial killer in recorded history, Báthory is depicted as another strand in the season’s tapestry of female violence against an oppressive patriarchal system.

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Báthory’s story is rooted in central Europe. Rome offers an architectural landscape that can convincingly stand in for medieval and Renaissance-era European settings. Rome’s ancient streets, stone palazzos, and period-accurate interiors are well-suited to conjure Báthory’s world.

Murphy himself framed the season’s scope in bold terms: “I always wanted to do something about the Countess Elizabeth Báthory, who Dracula was modeled after. So we are kind of doing this fantasia of women vs. the system.” Rome, with its layers of history spanning millennia, was the natural choice to bring that world to screen.

Italy has long been a magnet for prestige productions. The country’s tax incentives for film and television production, combined with its peerless architectural wealth, have drawn everything from James Bond films to HBO’s The White Lotus Season 2, which filmed extensively in Sicily.

Other Productions Filmed in Rome, Italy

The Real Fall River, Massachusetts – Where the Story Actually Happened

No article about Monster Season 4’s locations would be complete without addressing the place that started it all. The actual murders occurred in Fall River, Massachusetts, at 230 Second Street – a home that still stands today.

The Borden family home is now a fully operational bed and breakfast, known as The Historic Lizzie Borden House. True-crime enthusiasts, ghost hunters, and history buffs can actually spend the night in the house where Andrew and Abby Borden were killed on August 4, 1892. The house has become one of the most famous crime tourism destinations in America.

While Monster Season 4 did not film on location in Fall River (production was based in LA, Chicago, and Rome), the real house remains a powerful piece of American history. The town of Fall River itself retains much of its 19th-century character, with textile-era mill buildings and Victorian homes that give the city an unmistakable sense of the period.

RELATED: Where is Lizzie Borden buried? Real story vs Monster Season 4

Monster Season 4 Full Cast

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story boasts one of the most star-studded ensembles in the franchise’s history. This is the first season to center on a female perpetrator – a shift that Murphy has described as long overdue for the anthology.

Ella Beatty’s casting is the real headline. She is only 25 years old and is the daughter of Hollywood legends Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. Her previous credits include four episodes of Murphy’s own Feud: Capote vs. The Swans. Playing Lizzie Borden is her first lead role in a major production.

Sarah Paulson’s involvement is the season’s biggest twist. Paulson, a Murphy mainstay through American Horror Story, American Crime Story, and Ratched plays Aileen Wuornos, whose role in the season is described as depicting how Borden’s legacy of female defiance rippled through the decades. The addition of Wuornos mirrors what Season 3 did when it wove Ed Gein’s crimes into the fabric of films like Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Behind the Scenes

A Feminist Fantasia, Not a Straightforward True Crime Retelling

Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan have made no secret of the fact that Monster Season 4 takes serious creative liberties. Co-creator Ian Brennan told Vanity Fair that the season leans hard into the feminist dimensions of Borden’s story. “They literally thought that a woman was too weak to pick up an axe. To be a woman in that period was to be almost a completely different species,” he said.

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The season heavily embraces the theory that Lizzie and her maid Bridget Sullivan were in a romantic relationship, a theory that also drove the 2018 film Lizzie starring Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart. It weaves in modern needle drops from artists like Kate Bush and Wet Leg, giving the Victorian-era story a deliberately anachronistic pulse.

Rebecca Hall, who plays the stepmother Abby, perfectly captured the tone when she described the season as “Ryan Murphy does Cinderella” except the glass slipper gets replaced with a bloody hatchet.

Three Storylines, Three Eras

Season 4 is the most structurally complex Monster installment yet. It spans:

The show uses all three women to explore the same central question: what does a system built on the oppression of women produce? The answer, apparently, is monsters.

Charlie Hunnam Returns in a Very Different Role

One of the more interesting behind-the-scenes stories is Charlie Hunnam’s return. After playing Ed Gein in Season 3, Hunnam was immediately cast as Andrew Borden, Lizzie’s tyrannical father in Season 4. Early behind-the-scenes photos showed him in a long brown robe with full, curly hair, almost unrecognizable from his usual appearance.

The Production Budget

Each episode carries an estimated budget of $5–7 million, well above average for a prestige streaming drama. That investment shows up in the costume design, period set construction, and the breadth of international filming.

Where to watch Monster Season 4?

All eight episodes of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story are available to stream exclusively on Netflix starting September 17, 2026. All episodes drop at once, so binge at your own risk.

Previous seasons are also streaming on Netflix and make for worthwhile viewing before diving into Season 4:

Season 1 remains Netflix’s No. 6 most-watched English-language TV title of all time, reaching 1 billion view hours in its first 60 days. Season 2 received 11 Emmy nominations. Season 3 earned 7 Emmy nominations including recognition for Hunnam’s performance.

RELATED: Get Hooked on Crime: The 10 Best True Crime Documentaries on Netflix

Reviews and Critical Reception

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story hasn’t officially aired yet at time of writing, but the pre-release coverage has been notably divided and that itself tells a story.

What Critics Are Saying Ahead of the Premiere?

The Boston Globe offered a skeptical pre-release take, noting that Murphy and Brennan have “seemingly chosen to fill the story of Lizzie Borden with whatever outlandish plot machinations they desire.” The paper flagged the show’s more fantastical creative choices including depictions of Bridget Sullivan as a “fairy godmother” figure as departures from anything a historian would recognize.

Vanity Fair, which got the exclusive first-look access, framed the season in far more generous terms. Their headline dubbed it “a blood-soaked feminist romance,” and cast members’ quotes suggest a show aware of its own excess and leaning into it gleefully.

How Audiences Have Responded to Previous Seasons

The franchise has proven that controversy doesn’t hurt viewership.

Is it historically accurate?

This is the question that will dominate post-premiere conversation. The short answer: not entirely, and Murphy doesn’t pretend otherwise.

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The 1892 Borden murders are unsolved. No other suspects were ever charged after Lizzie’s acquittal. That ambiguity gives Murphy enormous creative latitude. The inclusion of Aileen Wuornos and Elizabeth Báthory in the same season makes it clear that Monster Season 4 is operating as a thematic exploration of female violence against patriarchal oppression, not a documentary.

The real Lizzie Borden’s relationship with Bridget Sullivan, for instance, has long been speculated about, but never confirmed. Her friendship with actress Nance O’Neill which caused a public scandal at the time is also a matter of historical record. The show dramatizes both with Murphy’s characteristic flair for the provocative.

Other Famous Screen Portrayals of Lizzie Borden

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Paul Fogarty

Paul is an entertainment news writer and the newest family member of Castalkie who joined in October 2022. His interest is in covering the filming locations of movies and TV shows.

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