The Monster season 5 subject remains unconfirmed, with Netflix yet to even renew the anthology for a fifth run, but creator Ian Brennan has given the clearest picture yet of where the series might go next.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story premiered on Netflix on 17 September, following the events leading up to the axe murders of Lizzie Borden’s parents in 1892 and her controversial acquittal. It is the first season of the series to centre on a female protagonist. Netflix, as is its habit, is waiting to assess viewer response before committing to another season.
Luigi Mangione, Ted Bundy and a ‘Fairly Exhaustive List’
Brennan and Ryan Murphy are not short of candidates. ‘It’s always three or four different ones, and we toggle between,’ Brennan told The Hollywood Reporter in a September 2026 interview. ‘It’s a fairly exhaustive list, but it’s tricky. You’d be surprised at how many subjects we start and then abandon, because it’s just not [right]. You can really tell when it’s wrong right away, because you’re asking people to spend seven or eight or nine or 10 hours getting inside this person’s head. They better be really interesting.’
One name that came up: Luigi Mangione, accused of gunning down United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024. Brennan said the team had been trying to develop that story but found it resistant. ‘We were trying to crack the Luigi [Mangione] story and it was just laborious and nobody knows it yet,’ he explained. ‘It’s still too new; unknown and esoteric.’ Murphy, speaking to Variety in September 2025, was similarly noncommittal, placing Mangione in his ‘”maybe one day” file.’
Ted Bundy, meanwhile, sounds unlikely to make the cut at all. Brennan’s reasoning says a lot about how the creative team approaches the Monster season 5 subject question. ‘When you look at those crimes,’ he said, ‘what are the themes there? It doesn’t ask you any questions about society.’ The test, then, is not notoriety alone but whether the case opens something up. Whether it makes you think. Which, given the subjects the series has already chosen, is not a bad bar to set.
Easter Eggs, Ed Gein and How the Next Subject Might Emerge
Brennan confirmed that the Lizzie Borden season contains no deliberate clue about who the Monster season 5 subject might be. ‘No [it does not], but we’ve ended up doing that in the past,’ he told Us magazine. He pointed to The Jeffrey Dahmer Story as an example, where an Ed Gein Easter egg appeared without the creative team initially knowing it would lead to a future season. John Wayne Gacy also featured in that Dahmer season as a point of contrast.
‘These things are always on our minds,’ Brennan said. So while the Lizzie Borden season does not plant a flag for what comes next, the history of the show suggests the seeds might be in there regardless.
There is also the longer arc to consider. Both Murphy and Brennan have stated they want to make 10 seasons of Monster in total, which would make the current fourth season only the midpoint of the whole run. With that kind of ambition on the table, the question of the Monster season 5 subject is less about whether the series continues and more about the order in which its list gets worked through.
Brennan’s description of that list, ‘exhaustive,’ regularly revised, full of subjects the team starts and then sets aside, suggests the next season could still take any number of directions. The show has moved from Dahmer to the Menendez brothers, to Lizzie Borden, each time finding a new angle on what makes a person capable of the unthinkable, and what that says about the world around them. Whoever comes next will need to clear that same bar. Apparently Ted Bundy does not.
