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Plate I — The Legend of Lizzie Borden, 1975moviesanddrinks.com · Image may be subject to copyright

The Legend of Lizzie Borden, 1975 · Weapon

hatchet

Name: No Brand hatchet
Brand: No Brand
Availability: Discontinued

Lizzie Borden in The Legend of Lizzie Borden, 1975 — as worn by Elizabeth Montgomery

In the film’s climactic reconstruction inside the Borden house, Lizzie Borden, played by Elizabeth Montgomery, is shown sealing the house off, then reaching beneath her mattress for a hatchet before moving into the murders of Abby and Andrew Borden.

The scene

In the film’s climactic reconstruction inside the Borden house, Lizzie Borden, played by Elizabeth Montgomery, is shown sealing the house off, then reaching beneath her mattress for a hatchet before moving into the murders of Abby and Andrew Borden. The sequence arrives through the movie’s shifting pattern of testimony and flashback, so what appears on screen is presented less as settled fact than as the film’s imagined solution to the case. After the attacks, the action continues through the practical aftermath the movie proposes: Lizzie washing in the basement, changing clothes, and disposing of the weapon in the privy.

That hatchet is crucial to the film’s argument about Lizzie in this moment. Contemporary accounts of the production and later criticism note that The Legend of Lizzie Borden repeatedly moves from courtroom evidence into subjective visualizations tied to Lizzie’s face and memory, making the weapon part of a private, almost secret domestic ritual rather than a sensational prop. Because the film treats the murders as something enacted within the ordinary routines and spaces of the house, the hatchet reads as blunt, familiar, and terrifyingly close at hand.

On screen, the weapon is framed for its compactness. Reviews of the film’s climax emphasize the montage-like, disturbing quality of the murder reconstruction, and the hatchet benefits from that compressed treatment: short swings, close quarters, and a workaday silhouette glimpsed in bedrooms, hallways, and cellar spaces. The lighting stays dim and interior, keeping the hatchet tied to the house’s oppressive intimacy rather than to spectacle.

Archive — the object

An unbranded, utilitarian hatchet with a metal head and short wooden handle, this screen weapon is presented not as a branded product but as an ordinary late-19th-century household chopping tool. That anonymity suits both the period and the case itself: contemporary discussion of the Borden murders centered on hatchets and axes found in the house, including the famously debated handleless hatchet head examined by investigators, rather than on any named maker. In that sense, the film’s prop belongs to a long tradition of plain domestic implements whose identity lies in function, not manufacture. Its design is correspondingly spare. The form is that of a one-handed working hatchet, compact enough for kindling, yard work, or general household use, with a sharpened blade on one side and a blunt poll on the other.

On screen in The Legend of Lizzie Borden, the lack of ornament helps the object read as a believable period implement rather than a theatrical showpiece. Publicly available sources do not identify a documented manufacturer or a surviving production record for the prop, so the safest classification remains an unbranded, generically sourced or custom-dressed period weapon. In The Legend of Lizzie Borden, which premiered on ABC on February 10, 1975, the hatchet becomes central to the film’s speculative reconstruction of the 1892 murders. The production stars Elizabeth Montgomery as Lizzie and stages the killings with a hatchet in keeping with the popular and historical association of the case, even though the real weapon was never conclusively established.

Its afterlife is therefore tied less to prop collecting than to the film’s reputation. The movie later reached home video in a Region 1 DVD release in 2014 after years of harder-to-find circulation, and it remains one of the most discussed screen versions of the Borden story. What endures is the image of the plain hatchet itself: not a signature brand object, but an everyday tool transformed by one of America’s most persistent murder legends.

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