Lizzie Borden Films and Fiction: Which Version Gets Her Right?

Lizzie Borden Films and Fiction: Which Version Gets Her Right? | What’s on Shudder Kit Whitfield

Lizzie Borden films have been trying to explain the Fall River axe murders since the 1950s, and each one ends up telling us more about its makers than about her. In this What’s On Shudder, Kit Whitfield starts with Lizzie on Shudder, the 2018 film with Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart. Then she works back through an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, Elizabeth Montgomery’s Emmy-nominated 1975 TV film and Christina Ricci’s 2014 Lifetime take. Each gets a fair hearing and a sharp eye for what it fumbles. Last comes Angela Carter’s Lizzie Borden, found in two short stories rather than on screen. Here is Kit on a woman who is famous and yet almost impossible to film.

Lizzie Borden slips between every archetype we have, so each adaptation ends up showing us its makers. The 2018 Shudder film looks good but never finds a question to pull us along, the 1975 TV film is the best screen version, and Angela Carter, writing myth rather than true crime, gets closest of all.

---

[Content warning: violent murder, obviously. Sexual abuse. Towards the end, CSA and body-shaming. Neither will be graphically described and I’ll warn in advance.]

The Older Sister (1956); The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975); Lizzie Borden Took An Ax (2014); Lizzie (2018)

‘The Fall River Axe Murders’(1985); ‘Lizzie’s Tiger’ (1993)

Well, my pretties, it’s that time of the year again: the time we wish Netflix’s leading horror bods weren’t Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan. A recurring anthology series based on horror archetypes, and a recurring true crime show about famous tragedies – that sounds great in theory. But this is what we get, so I’m not interested in watching it.

Last year I talked about how, if you’re interested in the trans killer archetype, there’s better to watch than Monster: Ed Gein. This year let’s talk about how, if you’re interested in in Lizzie Borden, also there’s better to watch. Here are some suggestions!

Which Borden do you like?

There are a lot of fictionalisations of those famous murders and I’m not going to pretend I can tackle all of them. Let’s gather up a handful of the interesting ones, though, and see what shakes out. Amidst the nonsense, is there a good Lizzie Borden story out there?

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her father forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her mother forty-one.

That’s the skipping rhyme. That’s a folk legend right there. A folk legend calls for an archetype.

The trouble is, Lizzie Borden herself didn’t fit very easily into an archetype. She occupied a kind of blank space between many of them, making her, for a woman so documented, oddly elusive.

For a woman about whom we can ask such an interesting question as ‘Did she murder her family?’, she was awkwardly uninteresting. That’s quite the storytelling problem.

The Borden house was extensively studied, right down to the floor plans you can still see today: a sturdy and impressive place, but with an oddly dislikeable feature – no corridors. There was no way to get from one room to another without going through somebody else’s; the family had a habit of keeping all their doors locked because otherwise there could be no privacy.

So we know it wasn’t the ideal home. We know it was sizeable, but in the unfashionable part of town despite being owned by a man worth, in today’s money, around eleven million dollars. We know it had a pear tree: Lizzie claimed to be eating from it on the fatal day. We know it had a barn with pigeons: many versions of the Borden story take a dramatic moment to show Lizzie’s father killing her doves as a provocation, though whether they were actually her pets or just livestock for the family table is disputed.

(Here’s a bunch of fact-or-fiction sheets if you’re interested:

https://eu.wickedlocal.com/story/archive/2013/08/02/lizzie-borden-fact-vs-fiction/38186508007/

https://eu.heraldnews.com/story/news/history/2022/03/15/fall-river-myths-busted-lizzie-borden-shoplifter-viking-skeleton-armor/9405674002/

https://www.criminalelement.com/11-facts-about-lizzie-borden-debunked-sarah-miller-murders-trial-of-the-century-forty-whacks/

https://lizzie-borden.com/blog/lizzie-borden-fact-vs-fiction/)

But Lizzie herself?

We don’t have much to go on. She lived a fairly undramatic life, right up to the moment she didn’t. At the trial she contradicted herself considerably – very possibly because she was on sedatives – and so her voice, preserved in the records, doesn’t leave behind a coherent story.

Even the trial itself was a set of absences. Lizzie Borden wasn’t so much proven innocent as not proven guilty – and the investigation was hardly thorough. Most notoriously, there was a bucket of bloody clothes the police didn’t examine very thoroughly: Lizzie said it was menstrual blood, and at that time and place you didn’t look into the monthly secretions of a lady. But the whole question of Lizzie’s guilt really rests on the fact that there weren’t many other suspects: if she didn’t do it, who else could have?

But if she did, why? She stood to gain a big inheritance, and without her father to tell her what to do she was a lot more free to spend it. Her father had bought a house for an in-law while she and her sister had to live at home; she might have been worried about what would be left for her in the fullness of time. There were some family tensions.

But that’s hardly an irresistible motive – and certainly not for a murder so violent. Lots of families have disputed inheritances and private disagreements; very few women pick up a hatchet. Maybe, some modern writers argue, Andrew Borden was abusive; that might explain the extremity of the crime. Maybe so – but we’re into speculation now, because again, there’s just an absence there. We don’t how things were between the Bordens in private, either before or during the day two of them died.

There are only so many ways to go here.

We can shrug and say we just don’t know – and probably minimal madness that way lies, but it’s not the stuff of dramatic fiction. We can decide she was innocent, or at least not proven otherwise, in which case any motive for murder becomes moot.

Or we can decide that it was her – it had to be someone – and then . . . well, when it comes to why, all we’re really left with is Lizzie herself.

This is what she looked like.

Film is visual, and Lizzie doesn’t fit any of our fairytales. At the time of the murders she was in her early thirties, a smartly-turned-out, ordinary-looking, mostly undemonstrative woman whose face wouldn’t provoke any speculation if you saw it in a crowd.

Neither young enough to be a princess in a tower, nor old enough to be a wicked witch. Neither beautiful enough to be a femme fatale, nor ugly enough to be a monster. She was there on the day, but as a presence in history, she’s just . . . there. Just a woman of unremarkable age and unremarkable appearance, who might or might not have done something terrible for reasons that remain unknown.

Lizzie Borden slips through the cracks between our archetypes – so we have to bring our own archetypes with us.

Material details of the day abound, but what happened and why? Storytellers can only approach it in terms of what makes sense to them – and so Lizzie Borden stories end up telling us what makes sense to the people who invent them. Every Lizzie Borden story reveals more about the teller than it does about Lizzie Borden.

Let’s start with a simple one: the Hitchcock blonde

Yes, Hitch did his own take on this: there’s an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode called ‘The Older Sister’ that follows an intrusive journalist’s visit to the Borden house a year after the murders.

First the Lady Journalist – it needs the capitals, because she’s that kind of bossyboots – determinedly pushes her way into the Borden home to interview Emma Borden, the Younger Sister, a delicate, distraite little blonde thing who’s deeply pained by discussing her sister.

Then Lizzie herself enters. If you’ve seen any of Hitchcock’s classics, the one you want here is Rebecca, specifically Judith Anderson as Mrs Danvers.

You can see it right off, no? Rebecca was in 1940 and ‘The Older Sister’ in 1956, so Hitchcock was playing an old song here. An older woman, black-robed, lace-collared, somewhat mannish and full of force; a younger woman, fair, delicate, faint with fear.

With a twist! Because – look, it’s been seventy years, I think I can spoil it – in this version Lizzie is not, in fact, the murderer. She’s covering for the fact that the killings were done by neurotic little Emma.

In the Hitchcock oeuvre that’s actually quite a clever flip: you recognise the pairing of fearsome matron and shrinking violet right away, and playing off appearances means you have to get to the end to realise you’re actually in a different archetype – that Emma is not the damsel in distress but the unruly hysteric. Still very much a female stereotype, and a more mid-twentieth-century one than most, but as a thriller short it works well enough.

We just have to throw out any idea it’s about Lizzie Borden.

Not just because Emma Borden had an alibi for the murders – but because she wasn’t the younger sister. The younger sister was Lizzie. Emma was a decade older. This is complete fiction, down to who was even who.

The archetype here isn’t really about Lizzie Borden, but about the idea of Lizzie Borden. Specifically, the idea of the unsolved crime.

What matters in this version isn’t the woman herself; she can be replaced with a traditional Hitchcock pairing with no hesitation. No, what matters is the simple fact of our uncertainty: the did-she-or-didn’t-she at the centre of her story.

Which honestly is smarter than the twist itself. Or at least, it’s showing Hitchcock’s characteristic workmanlike intelligence about what parts of the story to tell.

Hitchcock looked at a story full of absences and saw not so much a psychological or social conundrum but a space into which he could pour his usual talent for mystery and thrills. It’s a pragmatic approach that doesn’t bother to humanise Lizzie, but treats her as the scandal that she unarguably was.

It doesn’t make any social point, but it isn’t pretending to, and that’s fine. Nobody watching this would mistake it for an accurate depiction of a real person. It’s more or less treating her like Jack the Ripper: because the question is unanswered, pulp fiction can provide any answer it likes on the understanding it’s just fooling about.

As long as it’s clear it’s just fooling about, which is what people often have against Murphy and Brennan. But Hitchcock doesn’t pretend this isn’t pure imagination, so while it’s not the most profound or thrilling thing he ever presented, it’s a perfectly all right little short.

The trouble with Lizzie Borden is that humanising her presents an impossible conundrum: to excuse her, we have to convict her.

The real Lizzie Borden was acquitted of the crimes. Legally speaking, she didn’t do them. And who knows? Maybe she didn’t. It’s not as if the police at the time had a crack forensics team.

Popular culture tends to believe she did, though. Or at least, it has to entertain the idea if it’s going to dramatize her.

If we’re going to pull a Hitch and work up another suspect, then we’re essentially looking at a whodunnit rather than a horror or thriller story. If we want to ask the other question – what did it mean to be Lizzie Borden? – then ‘not guilty’ makes for a rather dull answer. A not guilty Lizzie Borden is just a normal person who had a series of bad experiences and then got on with her life. To engage with all the drama of the question – family crisis, female rage, secrets and violence – a guilty Lizzie is a necessary starting point.

So to engage imaginative sympathy, we have to picture a murderer. We have to do what the jury didn’t and, right from the foundations up, say yes, she dunnit.

That’s where all the other stories I’m going to talk about here go. It brings us to another archetypal question: what makes women violent?

Let’s remember the column’s name and talk about the one on Shudder.

Lizzie, 2018, was directed by Craig William Macneill and stars Chloe Sevigny as Lizzie and Kristen Stewart as Bridget, the maidservant who was present on the day and swore she didn’t see or hear anything – in this version because she was Lizzie’s lover and accomplice.

Lizzie-as-lesbian isn’t anything new, by the way. Wikipedia says it was rumoured in her lifetime but doesn’t cite any sources; she never married, at least. The first major player to put it into fiction was Evan Hunter in 1984, in his book also titled Lizzie. (Fictional adaptations all tend to have very similar names, I’m afraid, so as far as possible I’m going to refer to them by dates. Otherwise we’d all be hopeless confused)

I haven’t read the Hunter book, but I’d speculate it’s good. Evan Hunter, also known as Ed McBain, was a heavy hitter – an exceptionally prolific and versatile writer who, fun fact, also worked with Hitchcock, adapting Daphne du Maurier’s short story into The Birds, before quitting the script of Marnie halfway through because they couldn’t agree about a rape scene.

Hitchcock thought it essential, Hunter wanted it cut; the novels of his I’ve read take rape very seriously and I’m not surprised he balked at including a scene where the heroine is forced by the man she later decides she loves. It absolutely destroys the movie. Hunter was right, Hitchcock was wrong. So I’d expect the handling of sexuality in a Hunter book to be thoughtful, but like I say, it’s on my wish list rather than my read pile.

There’s not a reason in the world to believe that the actual Lizzie and Bridget were lovers, but let’s put that aside. In this 2018 film it’s part of a more general thesis, which is that Lizzie was driven to murder by the endless frustrations of being a woman in 1892: financially dependent, powerless over her own fate, and generally on opposite sides with men.

Which is, unfortunately, a bit of a problem in the end.

Not the feminism; if you don’t think about feminism in a story like this you’re frankly being weird. But the fact that it’s so doggedly feminist that both subtlety and drama get rather lost along the way.

It was co-produced by Sevigny, and it has that quality you sometimes get when the producer and the star are the same person: the lead character’s feelings are so important that other characters become rather two-dimensional – which weakens every character including the lead, because the only good way to convey character in a film is to show someone interacting with other characters.

When you don’t have that, people become incarnations of the creative team’s opinions. Perfectly good opinions, perhaps, but not perfectly good drama. (Yes, The Handmaid’s Tale, I am talking about you.)

The key moments are all there.

Andrew Borden is a weighty patriarch handing the family finances over to an incompetent male relation instead of his daughters. He kills Lizzie’s doves to punish her for something, in this case stealing from him – though what the theft says about Lizzie really isn’t gone into. He’s sexually abusing poor Bridget, the maid.

Lizzie and Bridget are united by their mutual attraction, but also by their shared helplessness in the face of patriarchy. Erotic cross-class feminism. And look, I adore Fingersmith – I actually asked for and got the audiobook performer Juanita McMahon to do my Gyrford series because her performance of Fingersmith is one of my comfort listens (https://tinyurl.com/yry885ts) – but if you’re going to do that, you either have to give the rich girl problems that are genuinely comparable to the poor girl’s, the way Waters does, or else do rather less to imply they’re in exactly the same boat. At least one of their little crafts has cushioned seats, you know?

This film’s Lizzie and Bridget . . . don’t cancel me, but it doesn’t quite work. Their parity is too simplistic.

It’s partly the fact that Lizzie’s all up on Bridget from their first meeting, a little bit of sensual hairpin re-arranging that’s doubtless hot if you’re into it but, in the actual context of the story, is putting hands on an impoverished subordinate who can’t slap them away. That’s rather more reminiscent of Lizzie’s father than I think the film intends.

Partly it’s the direction. If you watch a single scene out of context you’d say this was a good, thoughtful movie – but they add up to a lot of sameishness. Sevigny and Stewart are both good actresses in the right role, but . . . how to say this? Neither is challenged – and for both of them, for different reasons, they should be.

Sevigny is a versatile and compelling actress with a great capacity for subtlety – when she needs to be. She has range, but she isn’t directed to display it here, staying confined within that stony-faced petulance that she always delivers well, but that doesn’t carry a whole film.

Stewart is a powerful screen presence. Versatility isn’t her strong suit; she doesn’t have much range, but what she does, she does well. If you want someone to look torn between fascination and hesitation, she’s your girl. It got her mocked in Twilight but she got past that; it was well deployed in films like The Runaways (2010), and given enough to do with it she can sell it to good effect. But again, she isn’t given much to do: if you’ve seen one of her scenes you’ve seen them all.

And partly it’s just that the script is mightily on the nose. It’s full of lines like ‘Decisions are being made on my behalf,’ and ‘My father only keeps his counsel out of some adolescent need for male companionship,’ and ‘You’re just another girl, past ripe, who thinks that she’s too special for this world.’ And okay, we get it, but a film really needs one or two of those conversations maximum. Lizzie has far too many of them.

The pity is that it’s visually very strong; its framing conveys a lot of what it means to say without needing to spell it out.

Andrew Borden, for instance, is consistently framed with Lizzie just slightly blocking our view, turning him into a menace perceived by her rather than a man seen through male eyes. The film literally keeps him in the background ever so slightly, heightening his power and diminishing his meaning at the same time. That’s much better character work than we get in the script.

The house itself is an oppressive presence too. The filter seems to have been going for emotional coldness rather than the heatwave that notoriously affected Fall River at the time of the murder, which is a slightly odd choice, but we get all these shots of stiff angles, upright edges, sharp corners, as if the house is braced with such propriety you can hardly breathe.

So the film is well executed visually, and you can’t say that its thesis statement is easy to miss. It’s the kind of film you could point to if you’re criticising Murphy and Brennan to say, ‘Look, if you want to make a point about queerness being liberating and gender roles being confining, you can do it like this!’

It just doesn’t get past the central problem: how do you make this story exciting?

I know that sounds like a stupid question. It’s the story of a literal axe murder: how could that be boring?

Well, it comes down to a storytelling rule of thumb: to keep the audience engaged there needs to be some kind of question pulling us along. What’ll happen next? How does it feel to be here? What will this do to the protagonist’s psyche?

And the trouble is that Lizzie 2018 sets out its answers so neatly at every turn that there’s never much of a question.

We know she’s guilty in this version; that’s obvious from the start. There’s a little uncertainty how deep Bridget’s accompliceship goes, but it’s not established as a key question. The answer was always going to be some variant of ‘It was Lizzie’s crime and Bridget was in on it to some degree’, and that is indeed what turns out to be the case, so exactly what degree doesn’t make all that much difference. The Hitchcock option of ‘Whodunnit really?’ is off the table.

But we know why she did it and how she feels about it from the first few minutes too, because the film keeps telling us. Further reasons accumulate as we go along, but they’re honestly more like the archetypal Andrew Borden than the archetypal Lizzie: a heaping-up of capital when there was enough already. We had what we needed early on.

So let’s try another approach. We’re wheeling back in time all the way to 1975.

The Legend of Lizzie Borden, directed by Paul Wendkos, was a made-for-TV movie starring Elizabeth Montgomery giving an Emmy-nominated performance in the title role, and it’s actually pretty good. It won a couple of Emmys for costume and editing, plus an Edgar for Best TV Feature, so while I hadn’t heard of it till I went looking, it’s no slouch.

Now, this is definitely a film that thinks about feminism – remember, it was made right at the height of the Second Wave. A pompous man at one point dismisses sympathy towards Lizzie as ‘feminist’, and while it’s clear he’s using it in the Victorian sense, more or less as if he was saying, ‘Don’t give me any special pleading,’ no audience at the time would have missed the contemporary echo.

At the same time it’s very interested in being a period piece. There’s a Masterpiece Theater vibe to it: the sets and costumes are lavish, the performances feel classically trained, and you can imagine scenes from it appearing on any stage in the twentieth century. This isn’t a criticism, though: it’s a style, and it’s stylized by today’s standards, but it’s actually going for accuracy.

This doesn’t mean everything about it is what happened, but they did evidently study contemporary records and at least try to be on-point. This takes us to an interesting distinction:

What’s the difference between realism and accuracy?

The 2018 film feels like it’s trying to be realistic. The trouble with that is that if you’re not careful, your own ideas of what the world is like will, no pun intended, bleed into your fiction – and your own ideas on that score are a lot more timebound than you think they are.

The 2018 version, in its way, already feels more dated: it’s absolutely of the #MeToo moment and everything is filtered through that lens. And while it’s not in the least bit untrue to say that powerful men take sexual advantage of women, alas, Lizzie feels insistent on it to the point of oversimplifying. Even Lizzie’s elderly uncle gropes her by way of making a point in a family argument. Sexual exploitation is one manifestation of power imbalance but it’s not the whole story, and Lizzie leans heavily on a point that was new-made at the time but nowadays feels a bit like stating the obvious.

The 1975 version leaves out a queer reading; the maid Bridget is a character as she was in reality, but her struggles aren’t sexualised. She has to wash windows in the heat. She has to be deferential to a master who uses ‘Irish’ as a term of disparagement. She’s stuck in the middle of a dysfunctional family, unable to do anything about all the bullshit she has to witness. These are perfectly good reasons to consider the elder Bordens unsympathetic characters.

Which isn’t to say the film is chaste.

It actually goes further than the 2018 one in suggesting the possibility of incest inflicted on Lizzie by her father – just a hint here and there, but enough to be thoroughly uncomfortable.

Now, sexual abuse is one of those motives suggested as a reason for Lizzie’s actions. Certainly it was a violent murder for a woman who didn’t have a horribly physical motivation: the traditional female weapon is poison, not a hatchet. But this is one of those areas where there’s nothing but absence: we don’t know for sure what Lizzie Borden’s relationship with her father was like.

He allowed her spending money; that could have been generosity, bribery, control, or weakness to manipulation. He was buried wearing a ring she had given him; that could be anything from innocent devotion to creepy possessiveness. Any evidence gets read in the light of what we think is likely, and what we think is likely is about how we think, not the Bordens.

The 1975 film wishes us to be thoroughly uncomfortable, though.

In particular, it makes a point of the physical discomfort of the time. Andrew Borden was reputed to be such a skinflint he made his family eat spoiled food – probably not true, but there’s a properly yucky scene where he and his wife slurp down this disgusting mess, and you’d want out of that family too.

The day of the murders was famously hot, and the film, despite its high-quality costumes, makes a point of dishevelling its actors. People sweat in this film. They look like they’re in an actual heatwave.

And with that grubbier perspective, they’re free to take a position on Lizzie.

We get to see that her life is constrained and unpleasant. We get to see too, though, that she’s a rather selfish person – which, if we assume she did it, is not that big a reach. We don’t blame her for disliking her position, but to have that sympathy, we don’t have to think she’s a blameless individual.

There’s a very good scene between the prosecutor Hosea Knowlton (Ed Flanders) and his wife (Bonnie Bartlett) which, by keeping thesis statements to a minimum in the rest of the movie and focusing as much here on how people actually behave in different gender roles, makes a better feminist point than anything managed in 2018. They’re discussing the case over dinner – a meal he has refused to eat because it isn’t cooked to his liking, a fact he’s communicated with the brusque irritation of an employer, meaning his wife is already nervous towards him.

Knowlton: That woman actually believes she can get off scot-free by hiding behind her skirts.

Mrs Knowlton, as if it slips out: What else has she?

A frozen pause as he looks at her in anger.

Mrs K, head ducked in submission: I’m sorry, Hosea. It’s just that – it seems to me that – you men have only yourselves to blame if – if women hide behind their femininity as a last defence. After all – you cast us in this role.

K, coolly bemused: You look upon your womanhood as a role, my dear?

He slams down his napkin, stands in annoyance and walks across the room.

Mrs K: It’s not always a convenient part to play.

K: I have never heard you talk like this. Next you’ll be asking for the vote. I gather you sympathise with this murderess?

Mrs K: She has not as yet been found guilty, Hosea.

K: But you do sympathise with her?

Mrs K, almost in tears: Certainly not with her deeds. But perhaps with her motives.

K, laughing: Her motives? Now what would you know about her motives?

Mrs K: I should think a great deal, Hosea. You have no idea how unbearably heavy these skirts can be at times.

Now this is a good thematic-exposition scene. Mrs Knowlton says some fairly didactic lines – but it’s not just their rarity that helps them, the fact that scenes like this are very scarce in the movie so they have space to land when they appear.

No, the skill of the scene is in the fact that Mrs Knowlton isn’t talking to the camera – figuratively as well as literally. She’s talking to her husband, and she has to watch what she says because he’ll say things back. She knows what she thinks; she knows she’s an intelligent person. She’s struggling to make points that she’s diegetically never felt forced to express before.

But she’s also obviously afraid of acting that way towards him. Even if there’s no indication he’s a physical threat, and there isn’t really. He’s snappish, displeased; his violence, such as it is, is all psychological. It’s in the way he turns on her like a prosecutor the minute she challenges him, wilfully misunderstanding her in the worst possible ways he can find: obliquely accusing her of bad ‘womanhood’, of morally aligning herself with murder, of political subversion, all while dismissing any suggestion she might know what she’s talking about.

We’ve all met men who think they know more about being a woman than women do; she’s married to one, and the minute she mildly disagrees with him he scans everything she says with ferocious diligence for signs of the bad character it must take to have a mind of her own. There’s a profound psychological aggression that lies under the scene, proving her points better than she could herself.

That’s the key to playing out politics in such scenes. Characters can’t just state things: they have to remain alert to the consequences – because when the personal is political, saying what you think can be punishable. We talk about women being ‘socialised’ to act certain ways, but that’s the wrong word, it makes it sound like we’re brainwashed. What that actually means is that women know from experience that if you don’t act in those ways, you get instant hostility and negative consequences. Not ideology; pattern recognition. And this film can see the pattern.

The movie knows what it thinks about society – but it withholds what it thinks of the murders until right at the end.

I talked earlier about how you need a question to keep the audience’s interest on a hook. In this version it’s very simple: is Lizzie guilty or not guilty?

It probably won’t surprise you that the answer is yes; in a way, with its interest in small social frictions, any other answer would be rather crass, a sudden twist that distracted from the building tension. But it keeps us going with a subtler question too: how is the film going to frame Lizzie’s guilt?

A delicate balance of shock and psychology, is the answer. At the end we see the flashbacks. Lizzie commits the murders naked, answering the question about why her clothes weren’t bloodstained – and she murders her father just after a moment of tenderness with him. (Dressed; she strips off to kill her stepmother, redresses, talks to him, strips again and then murders him. We get the same trick in the 2018 film, though it feels less shocking as it’s more sexual. Generally speaking, naked axe murder is popular in these adaptations.)

As Lizzie swings the hatchet, memories flash across the screen: his over-intimacy with her in childhood, the deaths of the pigeons, the existence of her disliked stepmother . . . not one reason but many, the cumulation of a fraught relationship between two deeply flawed people.

So the question really isn’t ‘Did Lizzie do it?’ but ‘Is Lizzie a bad person?’

And the answer? Well, yes. But that doesn’t mean she’s the only person we should hold to account. More than in 2018, this take on feminism understood that we don’t need a ‘perfect victim’ to recognise injustice.

Or we could go for something lighter.

There’s a TV film directed by Nick Gomez from 2014 – from the Lifetime network, of all places – with the unapologetic title Lizzie Borden Took An Ax, starring Christina Ricci as Lizzie. What does that splashy title portend?

Well, pretty much the same story. The details are present and correct: eating pears in the morning, dead pigeons, beautiful costumes.

Not at all Victorian costumes, mind you. Christina Ricci has been a horror icon since childhood, and the camera follows her around in the knowledge that getting good shots of her famous face is half the battle. The actual Fall River inhabitants were dressed in sturdy Victorian maximalism, but Ricci, looking particularly sylph-like, is in light, elegant gowns that feel more like you’d expect from a slightly Goth influencer. They look lovely, and tell us right away that we’re not in the realm of true-crime realism here.

Part of the challenge with Lizzie Borden stories is the question of conscience: this was a real woman, who might even have been innocent, so how much should we mislead posterity?

The 2014 film is happy to play fast and loose with historical accuracy – Lizzie Borden famously burned a dress after the police search, for instance, but she didn’t do what Ricci-Lizzie did and burn it after the police had asked for it so they could examine a bloodstain. Rumours circulate that Lizzie Borden was a habitual thief and shoplifter; there’s no substantial evidence for that, but Ricci-Lizzie is a tea-leaf present and correct. The general approach is to shuffle things around and accept whatever myths were going if it makes the story more dramatic.

It’s hard to judge this version too harshly for that, though.

Fictionalisation is not the same as misrepresentation. One of the commonest j’accuses against Murphy and Brennan is that they make up all kinds of wild shit and present it as if it were true crime; that’s misleading the world about real people. If it’s obviously a loose version of events, though, it’s less misleading: let the film frame things like they’re just telling this story for fun, and the audience expectations of truth will adjust accordingly. What we expect to learn from Downfall, we do not expect of Inglourious Basterds.

The 2014 version signals pretty clearly that it’s not trying to be educational. Rock songs play through the soundtrack, blasting lyrics like, ‘Give me a shout so I’ll be hypnotised, with them swingin’ hips and them workout thighs, Oh Lord, what’s a man to do?’ and ‘I’ve got a dangerous, a dangerous mind!’ If you expect any care to be taken over accuracy here, I don’t know what to say to you.

Whether that’s an acceptable attitude to take towards a real murder is another question, of course. Rather than litigate it here, let’s just take the film for what it is: a Christina Ricci vehicle in which she gets to say lines like, ‘I just wish I had the freedom to live the life I always imagined.’ What do we make of it as it is?

Well, it’s a rather curious beast in terms of watchability. Ten minutes in and you feel you’re on an easy ride: the shots are attractive, the performances are decent, the art design is all pretty, and altogether it feels like a decent light thriller.

The trouble comes because it doesn’t really know how to handle its mystery.

Does it think Lizzie Borden was guilty? Well, look at the title. Obviously it does.

And yet it paces itself like a mystery.

The first minute and a half are quite excellent: shots of the house, little moments of who was where that will be instantly familiar to anyone who knows the story, leading up to the moment where Lizzie rounds a corner, sees her father’s head staved in, screams, and boom: screen black, titles come up. Solid.

The trouble is that the film has an odd relationship with time. After this we jump back to the lead-up, the building tension between Lizzie and her parents, and then twenty minutes in, back we are to the bodies and the scream. Okay – that’s the last time we’re going to be seeing that, right? Point made, right?

It will not be the last time.

We move on to the police investigation . . . and another quarter-hour along, we get this dialogue presented as if it’s an entirely new thought:

• Are you saying . . . that the girl did it?
• Yes. I think Lizzie Borden [pause for emphasis] killed both her parents with an axe, [pause for emphasis] in cold blood.

Is this supposed to be a new idea? All we’ve seen is reasons why Lizzie might feel like getting rid of her parents and an entire dearth of alternative suspects. As we move through the trial and further little flashbacks happen, moments of axe and blood, it starts to feel like the story is glitching, returning over and over to a question it answered in its own title.

It accidentally points up one of the core issues of Lizzie Borden: the lack of information. We know that on the morning Lizzie Borden was eating pears and Bridget Murphy was washing windows, but everything that actually matters? The real state of things within the Borden home, the psychology of Lizzie herself? Those doors are closed and locked.

In response, the 2014 film rather repeats itself.

Now, I’m not saying a repetitive structure is bad: you could really lean into that, going Rashomon and showing a different version of reality each leading up to the first moment everybody agrees on, the moment Lizzie screamed for help. If it had gone all in it could have created a dreamlike atmosphere in which the deaths return like a nightmare.

It could have worked if it had been more weird. As it is, it ends up feeling like a thin story padded.

An observation here for the gorehounds.

The injuries to Andrew Borden’s face were frightful, and also documented. The special effects team clearly put some effort into their work here and created a grisly prop showing the dead man, or what’s left of him. A flash of it once or twice on screen and it would have been properly unsettling.

Instead they show it again and again till honestly I started to feel a little irritated. It’s a weird emotion to feel about seeing a realistic depiction of a dead man – but it’s not paying the best respect either to the deceased or to the skills of your prop department to turn the audience response into, ‘What, again?’

And it continues right up to the end.

The final scene is of Emma Borden (Clea Duvall) finally confronting Lizzie over whether she did it, and Lizzie insisting on whispering the truth in her ear, after which Clea leaves and the end cards insist ‘The sisters never saw each other again.’ (Which is not strictly true; they did estrange after a while, but very possibly because the pious Emma felt Lizzie was living too raffish a life rather than because of any confessions.)

So what does Lizzie whisper? Well, of course, it’s the murder scene again, this time clearly showing Lizzie dunnit.

Which isn’t even a revelation, because by this point we’ve seen her swinging the axe during repeated flashbacks set at the trial. It happens during the prosecutor’s speeches, so maybe we’re supposed to think it’s just what he’s presenting rather than cold fact, but come on. This film is all aesthetic; visuals are what it is.

‘It is hard to conceive,’ he declaims, ‘that a woman could be guilty of this crime.’ But when you see shots of her doing it interspersed, it becomes a darn sight easier.

And yet the dramatic ending goes right up to the same moment we’ve seen twice already, Lizzie rounding the corner, seeing that much-used corpse prop, and screaming.

And look, it was a good moment, but it wasn’t that good.

The best way to describe this is to say it’s a small film.

Small cast, small narrative scope, small ambitions for accuracy, smaller number of scenes than the run time would suggest. It looks very good, especially for a TV movie, and apparently it did well enough that it led to a TV series called The Lizzie Borden Chronicles in which Lizzie travels, clashes with Pinkertons, and generally has! adventures! None of which she did in real life, so that should give you the flavour.

This is a Christina Ricci movie, not a true crime biopic. It doesn’t do anything hugely offensive; it doesn’t do anything particularly revelatory. Despite all the axe-swings, it ultimately doesn’t leave much impression.

Why did Ricci’s Lizzie commit the murders?

It’s oddly hard to say. She didn’t seem to like her father very much; he didn’t seem very likeable; there were some visuals they wanted to try out. It’s as if they wanted to preserve the ambiguity so much they chickened out of giving her real motivations – and then chickened out of leaving it ambiguous as well.

But 2014, the year it came out, was also the year of Sophie Amurso’s infamous book Girlboss. That whole style – look pretty, be ruthless, assume being a woman makes anything you do at least vaguely feminist – was definitely present in Lizzie Borden Took An Ax.

A Girlboss doesn’t need to have a deep understanding of feminism or capitalism, and this film didn’t need a deep understanding of murder. As a popcorn movie for horrorheads it’s . . . fine, but in the end it’s thoroughly disposable.

Is there a version I really love?

Well, it’s not a movie, but I do want to take a moment to talk about Angela Carter. Not least because we’ve had a whole run of films directed by men, and they were all written by men too. (With one female co-writer, Lillian de la Torre, on the Hitchcock one, which may be why that’s the only one that even considered a story beyond the basic, ‘It’s frustrating to be a woman and frustrated women get axe-happy.’) It’s about time we got a woman’s take, and that seems to mean stepping outside the film studio.

I love Angela Carter. Boy do I. The great witch of twentieth-century literature, author of prose shading past purple into heliotrope that she gets away with through sheer mastery.

Did you know that Carter wrote not one but two stories about Lizzie Borden?

I’m going to have to give a couple of warnings; I assume you’re braced for gore, but for Carter has other weapons up her sleeve. One of them, ‘The Fall River Axe Murders’, featured in Black Venus (1985), is very much not body positive. It makes a great deal both thematically and narratively out of stepmother Abby Borden being overweight and gluttonous, and it isn’t nice about it; it’s a cast of grotesques, and Abby’s physicality is part of that.

The other, ‘Lizzie’s Tiger’, featured in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993, published posthumously), involves a scene of a child being sexually assaulted. It’s not a scene of direct violence – rather a child too young to understand that she should be distressed by the situation she’s in – but deliberately uncomfortable even if it’s not a personal subject, so take heed.

The thing to understand about Carter is that she was, artistically, a deifier. In her hands, any character can be magnified to the scale of a shabby, sparkling demigod.

You’re not going to get naturalistic true crime out of this. But with the Borden murders, how could you? For all its documentation, there isn’t enough there.

Every interpretation of Lizzie Borden is going to invoke the icons of its era. Neurotic women for Hitchcock. Second-wave feminism in 1975. Girlboss in 2014. MeToo in 2018. Netflix Will Keep Commissioning Any Nonsense That Sells in 2026.

But Carter wasn’t in the business of invoking icons. She was in the business of creating them.

We’ll begin with ‘The Fall River Axe Murders’; that’s the one without child molestation, so you can dip out afterwards if you prefer.

It’s the morning of the murders as the story opens. It’s the minutes before the murders as the story ends:

Bridget’s clock leaps and shudders on its chair, about to sound its own alarm. Their day, the Bordens’ fatal day, trembles on the brink of beginning.

Outside, above, in the already burning air, see! the angel of death roosts on the roof-tree.

Rather than struggling with the thinness of recorded fact, Carter dives deep into it: what made that house infamous was the events of a single morning, so we’re going to make that morning everything. It is, for one family, the end of the world.

And as a world it’s . . . disgusting. Horrifyingly so. ‘Fit to make a sewer faint,’ Carter remarks. It’s a blazing heatwave, the house is close and stinking, everyone’s chamberpots are filled with the effluvium of stomach upsets, everyone’s clothes are smotheringly hot. The whole town reeks, laden with ‘the omnipresent acridity of horse piss and dung, drains, sudden stench of old death from butchers’ shops, the amniotic horror of the fishmonger.’

In reality the heat of the day was exaggerated. The mercury touched 83 degrees Fahrenheit, or 28 in Celsius – unpleasant in the humidity, but not the dank inferno Carter invokes.

But that’s Carter all over. A warm day? Set it the fuck on fire.

She doesn’t pretend she isn’t lying. Here’s how she addresses the presence of Lizzie’s uncle in the house:

Even though his presence in the doomed house is historically unimpeachable, the colouring of this domestic apocalypse must be crude and the design profoundly simplified for maximum emblematic effect.

Write John Vinnicum Morse out of the script.

This is a domestic apocalypse, and Lizzie its horseman. Ride with her.

Angela Carter’s stories aren’t so much beginning, middle and end as they are grab, plateau and orgasm.

A horrible orgasm in this case, but don’t look at me like that, you knew what you signed up for.

In a way the story is simple. Carter picks her way through the grotesequeries: Andrew Borden and his wife, the miser and the glutton; Lizzie, the dour darling of the house; the tensions and the filth and the rising unbearable pressure. We don’t see dialogue; we see description and foreboding and tangible textures that stain your fingers on the page.

If there’s a mystery, it’s this: what, among all the horrors, is what finally made Lizzie Borden snap? The answer emerges slowly: it’s the pigeons. Those legendary pigeons that probably didn’t have much to do with anything in reality, but here in the story form the perfect icon: Andrew killed them because their cooing irritated him, but Lizzie believes it was because his wife wanted to eat them. You can object to the fat-shaming aspects of the story, but it’s hard to think of a more fairytale image. A man killed the beautiful creatures his daughter loved to feed them to her ever-eating rival. For the sake of her stepmother, he cannibalized her heart.

But there’s also Lizzie herself.

Carter loved to write monsters, and she loved to write luxuries, and she sometimes wrote as if the two were one and the same. And in both this and her other story, Lizzie Borden fascinated her. She was so stolid-looking that she resisted everything Carter revelled in, and so drew a perverse revelry of her own:

Surviving photographs of Lizzie Borden show you a face it is difficult to look at as if you knew nothing about her; coming events cast their shadow across her face, or else you see the shadows these events have cast – something terrible, something ominous in this face with its jutting, rectangular jaw and those mad eyes of the New England saints, eyes that belong to a person who does not listen to you [. . .] Hers is not, in itself, a striking face.

But as soon as the face has a name, once you recognise her, when you know who she is and what it was she did, the face becomes as if of one possessed, and now it haunts you, you look at it again and again, it secretes mystery.

Again, Lizzie Borden looked like this:

Carter is right. We don’t know, and what we do know doesn’t tell us. The meaning is all in the myth. So let’s go into the myth and see what it turns us into.

In which case, what about Lizzie as a child?

That brings us to the second story, ‘Lizzie’s Tiger.’ It’s the story of a four-year-old child who, like a waif far too stolid for traditional tales, runs away to witness a circus. Specifically: there has been a tiger advertised, and despite her father refusing to give her pennies for entrance, she is so resolved to see it that she heads off to find it anyway.

Like I said, this is the one featuring child molestation. I won’t quote it, but I’ll explain in next three paragraphs and get it over with:

***

Near the end, the young Lizzie encounters a drunk man on the circus grounds who, finding her alone, puts her hand down his open pants. Lizzie doesn’t understand what’s going on. She isn’t very bothered because it isn’t painful, just odd; she’s already used to the day being a strange one, and her attention is mostly on her desire to find the as-yet-unseen tiger. Later we see him again and realise he’s the tiger’s keeper, a man who hits and jabs the beast to demonstrate his supposedly superior manhood – but nothing he can do, even what he’s done to Lizzie earlier, can blot out the magic of the beast.

Why would Carter do this? Well, it has various effects on the story. Partly it’s a demonstration of Lizzie’s difference, how she’s already entirely focused towards extreme violence and undisturbed by oblique forms of it. Partly it’s a hint at why men in general might have been creatures she grew up to dislike. And partly – I’d say above all – it’s a thematic drawing of a boundary: no, the tiger is not an icon of masculinity.

That is not what fascinates Lizzie here. Whatever calls to this girl, it’s nothing phallic; she’s already encountered a literal phallus and it didn’t make much impression. Don’t flatter yourself, Carter warns the male reader: when I talk about the tiger, I am not talking about you.

Carter wasn’t against virility: it was another thing she loved to write about, and she wasn’t unaware of the ways you could use animals to invoke it. On the contrary, she was one of the best artists of that invocation ever to live. She even did the great-cat-as-masculine-lover thing in The Bloody Chamber, invoked beautifully in both ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ and ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’, stories which are fantastical, disquieting and erotic in equal measure. Then she moved on. That was in 1979; this story came out in 1993. Carter’s done virile animals, and now she’s trying something else.

***

Okay, that’s that, now let’s talk tigers.

Who is this Lizzie? Well, that’s part of the trick: until the last sentence, when someone recognises ‘little Lizzie Borden’, we only hear her first name. If we’re familiar with Carter’s previous story, or I guess deep true-crime buffs, then the fact that she begins by telling us this is the daughter of a parsimonious coffin-maker living on Ferry Street with no mother and an older sister called Emma . . . yeah, you can’t say she doesn’t play fair, but she writes like she expects you to miss it.

The end, when it comes, is a surprise – but it isn’t a twist.

The entire tale is of a small child, ‘gruff’, self-interested, obdurate, and resolved above all to see the tiger. Her father won’t spare her the money, but ‘She had a whim of iron, this one.’ The story is a kind of epic quest through overcrowded fields and tatty razzle-dazzle – Carter loved circuses – until we finally reach the tiger which, like meeting the great whale Moby Dick, is an incarnation.

‘Don’t think any of this frightened her,’ Carter tells us. ‘She was not the kind of child that frightened easily.’

And then we get there:

The tiger walked up and down, up and down; it walked up and down like Satan walking about the world and it burned. It burned so brightly, she was scorched . . . In its hind legs the tense muscles keened and sang. It was a miracle of dynamic suspension . . . It was all raw, vivid, exasperated nerves. Upon its pelt it bore the imprint of the bars behind which it lived.

. . . Then something strange happened. The svelte beast fell to its knees. It was as if it had been subdued by the presence of this child, as if this little child of all the children in the world, might lead it towards a peaceable kingdom where it need not eat meat. But only ‘as if’. All we could see was, it knelt.

It’s ‘we’ who are in the tent now, witnessing the image of trapped, unspent violence that the future will uncage. That future hasn’t happened yet; it will only burst upon us, the hindsight-bearers, in the last sentence where we’re told a name that only has meaning decades after the story will end. But we see the hot, merciless thing, and it tells us what’s coming. Barred and burning, like recognises like.

People talk about Carter as a writer of ‘female rage’. She is, absolutely – but that’s not all she is.

Lizzie, here, is not rageful. She is in ‘The Fall River Axe Murders’, but here she’s a manifestation of will.

She looks like an angel, a little child that shall lead them, because she’s small. Carter is interested in something else: the being whose drama is all outside herself, in the things she loves and the things she’ll do. A small, cross little harbinger of doom, minutely implacable.

Power and danger are things of myth. They exist on the animal level. Through the eyes of the tiger, they aren’t even good or evil. They’re just undeniable.

Nobody can really depict Lizzie Borden.

She was just a private individual who may or may not have been guilty. Back in the day, the dispute over whether or not she was guilty was such a hot topic there was even a word for it: ‘Bordenmania’.

But the mania was never for Lizzie Borden herself. We don’t know who she was and we don’t know what she did. It’s the not-knowing that’s the whole point of interest.

It’s also an absolute bastard to turn into interesting fiction.

Adapters do best, on the whole, when the understand that the challenge isn’t to depict Lizzie Borden. It’s a silly challenge to try and do the impossible.

No: the challenge is to understand that we’re dealing with a set of Victorian facts and no answers, and decide as clearly as possible what part of that we’re going to embrace.

The best screen version, at least that I’ve seen, was the 1975 one: it looked through the lens of contemporary thought and didn’t pretend otherwise, and also made a decent effort to recognise that this was a historical drama, not a story about a contemporary woman. It’s not as accurate as it tries to be and it’s definitely of an earlier era in terms of style, but if you’re looking for a good drama on the subject, it’s neither mealy-mouthed nor tacky and it’s well worth a look.

But if you want the real meat, go for the OG and read Carter. She knew a myth when she made one. Six Lizzie Borden films and stories in, and still nobody has a confession. If you need closure, the Fall River house takes overnight guests these days. Pack light, and maybe leave the pears alone.

---

---

Ginger Nuts of Horror: The Heart and Soul of Horror Reviews

---