Before X premiered at SXSW in March 2022, Jenna Ortega described Ti West’s horror film as “the most outrageous thing I’ve ever read.” The reaction made sense: the film follows a young crew shooting an adult movie on a remote Texas farm, where the elderly owners turn against them.
Ortega’s role was more complicated than the film’s provocative premise suggests. She played Lorraine, a conservative Southern Christian woman working behind the scenes who finds herself caught inside a production that challenges her assumptions about sex, ambition and performance.
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What Jenna Ortega meant by “outrageous”
In the interview published ahead of the film’s SXSW premiere, Ortega was reacting to the script’s combination of explicit subject matter, period filmmaking and slasher violence. X is not pornography. It is a horror film about a group of filmmakers making an adult film, titled The Farmer’s Daughter, in rural Texas.
That distinction matters. The adult-film shoot is the story’s pressure cooker, not the film’s genre. Ti West uses the production to put several competing ideas in the same farmhouse: artistic ambition, sexual freedom, religious conservatism, commercial filmmaking and fear of aging.
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#1 Best Overall
- Runtime: 109 minutes
Ortega plays Lorraine, not one of the performers
Ortega’s character, Lorraine, starts the film as a crew member and the girlfriend of RJ, the production’s director, played by Owen Campbell. She is not introduced as a porn star. Her position outside the central group of performers gives her a different perspective on the shoot and on the people around her.
Ortega described Lorraine as a conservative Southern Christian girl. That background makes the adult-film set particularly jarring for her, but also potentially exciting: she is confronted with a world she has been taught to reject while watching other characters treat the work as a route to independence and success.
The tension is also personal. Lorraine is not simply an innocent outsider observing a strange production. Her relationship with RJ, her discomfort with the shoot and her changing view of what she wants all become part of the film’s conflict. The horror grows out of those emotional and physical pressures rather than existing separately from them.
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The setup for X
West’s story places a small film crew at a farmhouse rented from an elderly couple. The crew expects to spend the trip making The Farmer’s Daughter. Instead, the owners become increasingly hostile toward their guests, turning the isolated location into a classic slasher trap.
| Detail | Verified information |
|---|---|
| Film | X |
| Writer and director | Ti West |
| Ortega’s character | Lorraine, a crew member and RJ’s girlfriend |
| Film-within-the-film | The Farmer’s Daughter |
| World premiere | SXSW, scheduled for March 13, 2022 |
| U.S. theatrical release | March 18, 2022 |
Why Ortega took the role
Ortega’s main attraction was the chance to work with Ti West. By this point, West was known for carefully constructed genre films, and X gave Ortega a role that combined horror with a more specific character journey than a conventional victim part.
She was also interested in working with Scott Mescudi, who appears in the cast as Jackson. Ortega had followed Mescudi’s music, making the project appealing beyond its unusual script.
Rank #3
- Runtime: 155 minutes
The film’s look was another important factor. Although X is set in Texas, West filmed it in New Zealand. Ortega said the locations helped the movie visually, giving the production the rural isolation and atmosphere required by the story without relying solely on artificial sets.
How the SXSW context shaped the conversation
X had its world premiere at SXSW 2022, where it was presented as part of a cast that included Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Martin Henderson, Brittany Snow, Owen Campbell, Stephen Ure and Scott Mescudi. The festival setting put Ortega’s comments in the context of a first audience discovering the film’s unusual mixture of sex, horror and dark comedy.
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Outbyte PC Repair FREEClear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →The film’s provocative marketing could make it sound like a pornographic production in disguise. A more accurate description is a period horror movie centered on the making of an adult film. Its subject is deliberately uncomfortable, but West is using that subject to explore filmmaking, desire, repression and aging.
Rank #4
- Runtime: 95 minutes
West later described X as partly an examination of aging and filmmaking, shaped by his lifelong interest in horror cinema. That broader framing helps explain why the movie is more than a simple “young people arrive at a remote house” slasher. Lorraine’s unease, the crew’s creative ambitions and the elderly owners’ presence all point toward the film’s interest in who gets to be desired, who gets to create and what happens when people refuse to accept their own loss of youth.
Why the headline needs a correction
Some syndicated versions of the interview used “Jenny Ortega,” but the actress’s name is Jenna Ortega. They also used “porno-horror” as a shorthand for X. That phrase captures the film’s provocative premise, but it should not be read literally: X is a horror/slasher film about an adult-film shoot, not an actual pornographic movie.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.FAQ
What did Jenna Ortega call the script for X?
Ortega said it was “the most outrageous thing I’ve ever read.” She was discussing the script’s combination of an adult-film production, sexual and religious tension, and violent horror.
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Who does Jenna Ortega play in X?
She plays Lorraine, a crew member and the girlfriend of filmmaker RJ. Lorraine is initially a conservative Southern Christian woman working around the production rather than one of its adult-film performers.
Is X a pornographic film?
No. It is a horror film about young filmmakers making an adult movie called The Farmer’s Daughter at a remote farmhouse.
When did X premiere and release?
The film had its SXSW world premiere scheduled for March 13, 2022, and opened in U.S. cinemas on March 18, 2022.
The Bottom Line
Jenna Ortega’s “outrageous” description of X referred to a horror story that puts a sexually explicit film shoot, a conservative crew member and an isolated farmhouse in direct conflict. Ortega’s Lorraine is central because she experiences the production from inside it while questioning the values she brought with her. The result is best described as a slasher about the making of an adult film—not pornography itself.
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