Before she was wearing black lace and deadpan stares, Jenna Ortega was carving her path quietly—first through family TV fare and then in breakout roles that hinted at something deeper. While many still associate her with Disney’s Stuck in the Middle, Ortega’s instincts as an actress always leaned toward the complex and the uncomfortable.
Breaking Out of the Box: From Disney Darling to Dramatic Depth
It was The Fallout(2021) that made critics sit up. In it, she delivered a devastating, quiet performance as a high schooler dealing with the aftermath of a school shooting. There were no gory thrills, no comedic relief—just pain, vulnerability, and the kind of emotional weight that stays long after the credits roll.
That performance became the launchpad. Not because it made her a scream queen, but because it proved she had the range to carry darkness without theatrics. The kind of darkness that genre storytellers love.
X, Scream, and the Anatomy of a Modern Final Girl
From there, Ortega leaned hard into horror—but never traditionally. In Ti West’s X, she played Lorraine, a curious, conservative girl whose transformation into a scream-smeared survivor became one of the film’s most surprising turns. She wasn’t written to be the final girl—but she became one by defying expectations.
Then came Scream (2022) and Scream VI, where Ortega’s Tara Carpenter wasn’t just a nod to the past—she was a reckoning. Her performance brought rawness to a franchise built on self-awareness. She was both a homage and an upgrade. She bled, fought, and grieved like someone who knew horror tropes, but refused to be limited by them.
Her characters didn’t just react to trauma—they carried it. They embodied it. And they did so with a quiet, Gen Z disillusionment that felt more real than any final girl of the past two decades.
Wednesday Addams: Sarcasm as Survival
Of course, Wednesday (2022) changed the game. In Tim Burton’s reimagining, Ortega gave us a heroine who was neither victim nor villain, but a sardonic observer with razor-sharp intellect. She wasn’t terrified of monsters—she was annoyed by them. It was horror from the inside out: a young woman navigating darkness with wit, detachment, and an ironclad sense of self.
This role widened her audience and solidified her icon status. But more importantly, it revealed the shape of her scream queen evolution. Ortega wasn’t just in horror. She was reshaping it to reflect a generation fluent in anxiety, irony, and existential dread.
Death of a Unicorn: The Crown Jewel of Genre Bending
And now comes Death of a Unicorn—a horror-comedy hybrid where absurdity and existential crisis collide. In this A24 satire, Ortega plays the daughter of a biotech executive (Paul Rudd), whose accidental killing of a unicorn spirals into a strange, bloody, morally twisted adventure.
Unlike past roles, this film leans into the surreal. But Ortega plays it with the same edge we’ve come to expect: emotionally grounded, subtly biting, and deeply aware of how absurd it all is. She doesn’t just scream—she interrogates. She questions the world around her while holding a mirror up to our own.
Death of a Unicorn feels like the culmination of everything before it. The satire of Wednesday, the blood of Scream, the quiet pathos of The Fallout, the unexpected vulnerability of X. It’s a project tailor-made for someone who can laugh in the face of terror and still make us feel something real.
The Gen-Z Scream Queen Redefined
In many ways, Ortega’s career has become a genre commentary in itself. Her characters are no longer just survivors—they’re emblems of a generation trying to make sense of chaos, contradiction, and commodified fear. She’s never purely scared, never purely sarcastic. She’s both. Always.
And with Death of a Unicorn, Jenna Ortega doesn’t just cement her place as a modern scream queen—she redefines what the title means. She’s not just surviving nightmares. She’s rewriting them.
