When True Crime Becomes Fanfiction: Netflix’s Monster Wants the Authority of Truth and the Freedom of Fiction

Content warning: This article discussess murder, serial killers, real victims and their families, violence, victim trauma, racism, homophobia, sexualisation and the exploitation of real crimes in television.

There is a difference between taking inspiration from something horrific and rewriting somebody else’s horror for entertainment. At its worst, that is what true crime fanfiction becomes: reality providing the names, victims and authority while fiction fills in whatever history cannot.

I love horror. I love morally complicated characters. I love stories that take something uncomfortable, turn it over in their hands and force us to look at it differently. So my problem with Netflix’s Monster anthology is not that I think writers should be forbidden from touching real crimes. My problem is that Monster seems to want two things at once: the credibility, fascination and built-in audience that comes from telling us this really happened, while also wanting the creative freedom of fiction to decide that perhaps what really happened is not dramatic, sexual or narratively satisfying enough.

I do not think you get to have both without asking some uncomfortable questions about what you owe the real people whose names you are using. Once we move past whether these shows are technically “accurate”, there is a much bigger question sitting underneath it: who gets hurt when somebody else’s trauma becomes your television show?

There Is a Difference Between Inspiration and Impersonation

Whenever this conversation comes up, somebody inevitably points towards The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Ed Gein inspired Leatherface, so the argument goes, horror has always borrowed from real killers. And yes, it has. But that is not the same thing.

Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel drew on several real-world influences when creating The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, including imagery associated with Gein’s crimes. But Leatherface is not Ed Gein. His victims are not Gein’s real victims. The film does not recreate the murders of Bernice Worden or Mary Hogan while presenting those women as characters in an interpretation of their own deaths. It takes fragments of reality and transforms them into a fictional nightmare.

Monster puts the real Ed Gein at the centre of the story. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre did something different: it transformed fragments of his crimes into fiction rather than turning his identity into true crime fanfiction.

You could watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre knowing absolutely nothing about Ed Gein and never realise there was a connection at all. That matters because the film is not selling Ed Gein back to us. It takes inspiration and transforms it.

That is something fiction does constantly. Writers steal from life. An emotion from here, a personality trait from there, a historical event, a newspaper headline, something somebody once said that we never quite forgot. We take pieces of reality and create something new. There is an enormous difference between saying this inspired me and saying this is what happened. Monster trades much more heavily in the latter.

If You Use the Real Name, You Inherit the Real Responsibility

Jeffrey Dahmer is not a fictional serial killer loosely inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer. He is Jeffrey Dahmer. Ed Gein is not renamed and transplanted into a fictional universe. He is Ed Gein. Lizzie Borden is not the inspiration for an invented Victorian woman accused of murdering her parents. She is Lizzie Borden, and the people surrounding these figures frequently retain their real identities too.

Obviously, no historical drama can reproduce reality perfectly. Conversations happen behind closed doors, records disappear, memories contradict one another and writers have to compress timelines, reconstruct dialogue and make narrative choices. I am not asking television to become a Wikipedia article with cinematography. But there has to be a distinction between filling in a gap and inventing a new reality.

The latest season of Monster makes that distinction particularly uncomfortable. Lizzie Borden was accused of murdering her father Andrew and stepmother Abby in 1892. She was tried and acquitted, and the murders remain unresolved. Yet Ella Beatty has described her job as taking source material about the real Borden and translating it into the “very fictionalised version” created for the programme.

That admission matters because at some point, we are no longer reconstructing unknowable dialogue. We are writing fiction about real people while retaining the authority of their real names.

True Crime Fanfiction and the Lizzie Borden Problem

Whatever else can be said about Dahmer or Gein, Lizzie Borden occupies a fundamentally different historical position. She was accused, tried and acquitted. That does not prove she was innocent, but it certainly does not prove she was guilty either. We do not know.

Lizzie Borden during her 1893 murder trial. She was acquitted, leaving an uncertainty that true crime fanfiction can easily turn into narrative certainty.

That uncertainty is one of the reasons people are still fascinated by the case more than 130 years later. Yet the latest Monster season places Borden at the centre of an anthology built around “monsters” and creates a version of events in which historical uncertainty becomes increasingly secondary to the character the writers want to explore.

The contradiction becomes even stranger when you look at Netflix’s own material. Its Tudum article asks whether the real Lizzie Borden killed her parents and answers, quite plainly, that nobody knows. Its official programme listing, meanwhile, describes the premise by saying that Lizzie Borden “kills her parents”. The historical uncertainty disappears before you have even pressed play.

Netflix describes the programme’s Lizzie as a woman constrained sexually, spiritually and emotionally by the expectations of nineteenth-century America. That could be an interesting dramatic lens. The problem is that a lens is not evidence.

More importantly, the case did not need certainty imposed upon it to become compelling. The ambiguity could have been the story. Show me contradictory testimony. Show me several possible versions of that morning. Let me believe Lizzie did it in episode three and make me doubt myself by episode five. Show me how newspapers, gender, class and public fascination turned an acquitted woman into one of the most recognisable alleged murderers in American history. Let the audience sit with the fact that we cannot know.

Why does uncertainty have to be filled with invention?

What Does Ryan Murphy Think Monster Is Doing?

This is where the argument becomes more complicated, because I do not think it would be fair to suggest that co-creator Ryan Murphy believes he is simply making glamorous serial-killer television. Murphy and Ian Brennan have repeatedly treated the anthology as an exploration of what produces people capable of extraordinary violence, including the social forces and environments surrounding them.

That is a legitimate creative question. Why do people become capable of extraordinary violence? How much responsibility belongs to the individual, and how much belongs to family, society, abuse, prejudice, institutions or circumstance? Those are difficult questions worth asking.

And that is precisely why I find Monster so frustrating. There is a genuinely fascinating anthology buried inside the concept, but asking an interesting question does not automatically justify every storytelling decision made in pursuit of the answer. Nor does popularity. People have always been fascinated by murder. An audience proves appetite, not ethics. Millions of viewers do not tell us whether a victim was represented accurately, whether speculation was responsible or whether a surviving family member experienced the programme as exploitation rather than remembrance.

The Damage Does Not Disappear When the Credits Roll

This is where the conversation about “creative licence” becomes much less theoretical. For Ryan Murphy, Jeffrey Dahmer is a subject. For an actor, he is a role. For Netflix, Dahmer is a programme. For an audience, it is a series of episodes. For the people whose relatives Dahmer murdered, this is their family.

Some relatives of Dahmer’s victims openly criticised the production after its release. Rita Isbell, whose brother Errol Lindsey was murdered by Dahmer, objected after her victim-impact statement was recreated in the series. Shirley Hughes, whose son Tony Hughes was murdered, also challenged the programme’s portrayal. Murphy later said the production had attempted to contact around 20 relatives and friends of Dahmer’s victims during development, while relatives publicly said they had not been consulted about the production.

Even setting aside disagreements over who was or was not approached, the larger ethical question remains. Rita Isbell had already lived that moment. She had already stood in a courtroom opposite the man who murdered her brother. It was not a scene. There was no director. Nobody yelled cut. It was one of the worst moments of her family’s life.

Then decades later, that moment became television. An actress recreated her anger and grief for millions of viewers, and the recreation became something audiences could discuss in terms of performance, direction and dramatic impact. That is the part I struggle to get past.

Giving Victims a Voice Is Not the Same as Owning Their Voice

One of the defences of Dahmer was that the programme shifted attention towards victims and the institutional failures that allowed Dahmer to continue killing. That intention matters. Some of the strongest parts of the series are precisely the moments where Dahmer is not allowed to exist in a vacuum and racism, homophobia, policing and the repeated failure to take marginalised people seriously become part of the story.

Netflix’s portrayal of Glenda Cleveland was part of Dahmer’s attempt to shift attention towards victims and institutional failures, but representation does not automatically resolve the ethical problems of true crime fanfiction.

But telling somebody’s story is not automatically the same thing as honouring them. You can centre a victim narratively and still misrepresent them. You can give somebody an entire episode and still make their death the emotional climax of somebody else’s television show. You can say you are restoring humanity to people who became names in newspapers while simultaneously reconstructing their final hours for millions of strangers to consume as entertainment.

Those things can coexist. Good intentions do not automatically produce ethical storytelling.

And Then We Make the Killers Desirable

This is another part of Monster that makes me uncomfortable. Television understands attraction. It understands charisma, beautiful cinematography, sexual tension and fandom. It understands what happens when you place an attractive performer at the centre of hours of intimate storytelling and invite the audience into a character’s childhood, bedroom, desires, relationships, fears and vulnerabilities.

That does not mean actors portraying murderers need to be deliberately made unattractive, nor does showing someone’s humanity excuse what they did. Real people who commit horrific crimes are still human beings, and acknowledging that can sometimes be more disturbing than pretending evil arrives fully formed.

But there is a difference between humanising someone and mythologising them, and when real killers become characters that boundary becomes incredibly fragile. The killer receives psychology, motivation, childhood, sexuality, longing, close-ups and an aesthetic. The victim can slowly become a supporting character in the story of the person who killed them. Once that happens, the person who destroyed all of those lives becomes the most interesting person in the room.

That is not an argument against exploring why people commit horrific acts. It is an argument for remembering what storytelling itself does. Stories create intimacy. Spend eight or ten hours with somebody and you are doing more than conveying information about them. You are constructing a relationship between that person and your audience.

Lizzie Borden Makes the Sexualisation Problem Even Clearer

The Lizzie Borden season pushes that instinct further because sexuality becomes part of the interpretation itself. Netflix’s own character guide describes Lizzie as entering a “torrid relationship” with the household’s new maid, while the programme places sexual repression at the centre of its characterisation of her.

Netflix’s fictionalised relationship between Lizzie Borden and Bridget Sullivan turns historical speculation into one of the season’s central storylines, raising the question of when interpretation becomes true crime fanfiction.

The problem is not that a writer imagined a queer gothic relationship. As fiction, that could be fascinating. The problem is attaching that invention to identifiable historical people in a programme marketed through the authority of their real names.

The programme does not merely hint at the possibility either. Its own behind-the-scenes material says that the relationship was extrapolated from the fact that Lizzie and Bridget Sullivan were close and from speculation surrounding the case. The series then turns that extrapolation into a sexual relationship and partnership in murder.

If you want to write a story about two women trapped inside a repressive nineteenth-century household whose relationship becomes sexual, conspiratorial and violent, write it. But if history cannot establish that those particular women had that relationship, why are their real identities necessary? At what point does interpretation become appropriation? At what point are you no longer asking what might have happened and simply using a dead person as raw material for a better character?

You Cannot Ask for the Freedom of Fiction and the Authority of Truth

This, ultimately, is my problem with Monster. When historical accuracy becomes restrictive, it is a drama. When speculation makes the story more interesting, it becomes creative licence. When an invented relationship provides emotional or sexual tension, we are told the programme is exploring a possibility. But when it is time to sell the programme, the real name matters.

Jeffrey Dahmer. Ed Gein. Lizzie Borden. The real name is the hook.

You cannot repeatedly borrow the authority of reality and then retreat into it is only a dramatisation whenever somebody questions what you have invented. If your version of Lizzie Borden requires invented relationships, invented motivations and invented crimes to become the character you want to explore, perhaps what you actually have is the beginning of an interesting fictional character.

So create her. Write something brilliant about female rage, Victorian repression, sexuality, misogyny and murder without asking an acquitted historical woman to carry all of that invention for you. Fiction already gives you that freedom.

Who Gets to Own a True Story?

Maybe that is the question underneath all of this. Not whether artists are allowed to tell true stories, because of course they are, and not whether historical dramas will ever contain invention, because of course they will. The question is what changes when the story you are adapting belongs, in another sense, to people who had no choice about becoming part of it.

The people who benefit from these productions and the people who bear their consequences are not necessarily the same people. The production gets awards. The platform gets viewers. Actors get performances that can define careers. Writers get fascinating material. Audiences get entertainment. The families may get to watch the worst thing that ever happened to them recreated by strangers.

Sometimes they may watch audiences become fascinated with the person who murdered somebody they loved. Sometimes they are told the programme was partly made to give them a voice. And I think we are allowed to ask whether they ever wanted us to have it.

I do not want true crime to disappear. I do not want writers to stop examining real evil, and I certainly do not want fiction to become so frightened of causing discomfort that it stops taking risks. I want something much simpler: recognition that creative freedom and creative responsibility can exist at the same time.

If you choose to fictionalise a real person’s life, particularly somebody’s murder, the fact that you are legally permitted to tell that story does not answer every question about how you should tell it. If you choose speculation, call it speculation. If something is invented, do not allow the authority of a real name to make it feel like evidence. And if victims and their families are supposedly at the centre of your work, listen when those same people tell you what that work did to them.

If what you really want is complete freedom to create sex, violence, relationships, motives and murders that history cannot give you, fiction has already given you that freedom.

Invent the monster. Because the moment you choose a real name, you inherit something else with it: their reality.