Why Is Elizabeth Báthory in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story? The Connection Explained

Spoiler warning: This piece discusses flashback sequences from Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.

Partway through Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the show takes an unexpected detour: fantasy flashbacks depicting Elizabeth Báthory, a 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman, narrated as bedtime stories that Bridget “Maggie” Sullivan tells young Lizzie. Vicky Krieps, who plays Bridget in the main timeline, also plays Báthory in these sequences — a deliberate dual casting. Here’s who Báthory actually was, and why she’s in this show at all.

Who Elizabeth Báthory really was

Báthory (1560–1614) was a Hungarian countess accused of torturing and killing a large number of young women and servant girls in the early 1600s. She was never formally tried in open court; instead, she was placed under effective house arrest — walled into rooms at Csejte Castle — until her death in 1614, following accusations largely driven by political rivals. Several of her alleged servants and accomplices were tried separately, with confessions extracted under torture, which is a major reason modern historians treat those accounts cautiously.

The “blood bathing” legend: not a contemporary claim

The story most people know about Báthory — that she bathed in the blood of virgins to preserve her youth — does not appear in any contemporary trial testimony, witness account, or period document. It first surfaced in print in 1729, more than a century after her death, in the work of a Jesuit scholar. Modern historical scholarship increasingly treats the blood-bathing story as later legend layered onto a real but likely exaggerated case — with some historians arguing the scale of the accusations against her may have been politically motivated by rivals seeking her lands. This remains a genuinely disputed area of scholarship, not settled fact in either direction.

Is there an actual historical connection to Lizzie Borden?

No. There is no historical or biographical link between Elizabeth Báthory and Lizzie Borden — no shared associates, no documented awareness of one by the other, nothing. The connection Monster draws is purely thematic: both are historical women accused of extreme violence, both have become the subject of centuries of exaggerated legend, and Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan use Báthory’s story, filtered through Maggie’s bedtime tales, as a way of suggesting Lizzie’s own violent potential was being seeded early. As co-showrunner Ian Brennan has put it, the goal was drawing “a line underneath the idea that these women weren’t isolated events” — a storytelling device, not a claim of a real historical link.

Why Vicky Krieps plays both roles

Krieps was cast as Bridget based on her prior work in Season 3 of Monster, but the Báthory role reportedly came together much later in production — filmed separately in Italy near the end of the shoot, after Ryan Murphy pitched the idea to her directly. The dual casting reinforces the show’s thematic pairing: the same actor embodying both the fictional catalyst for Lizzie’s violence (Maggie) and the historical figure whose legend Maggie uses to normalize it for a young, impressionable Lizzie.

The pattern continues into the present day

Báthory isn’t the show’s only figure drawn into Lizzie’s orbit for thematic reasons — the finale does the same thing nearly a century later with Aileen Wuornos, another real person Netflix explicitly confirms had no actual documented connection to Lizzie’s case. Read that breakdown here. For the complete list of what’s real and invented across the season, see our true-story-vs-Netflix comparison.