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MVPs of Horror: Dee Wallace on delivering one of the all-time great screams in 'The Howling'

It's no wonder Dee Wallace is considered one of the greatest "scream queens" of her time. She delivered one of the most memorable shrieks in horror movie history when her newscaster Karen White begins transforming into a werewolf on live television in the 1981 favorite The Howling.

In a new interview with Yahoo Entertainment, the veteran actress recalled how she convinced director Joe Dante to let her scream for the fences for when it came down to capturing the famous sequence.

"[He] came up to me and said, 'Just give a little scream, we'll lay in [scream audio effects over it],'" Wallace told us. "And I went, 'Well, give me a shot at it!'

"I did it, and he came up afterwards and he said, 'Oh yeah, I think we're probably gonna use that scream. And they echoed it, which it made it even more powerful."

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Wallace needed only a single take to capture the blood-curdling sounds.

"I'm a good screamer," she cracked. "In a lot of ways."

Watch above as our 2019 MVP of Horror Wallace also talks about her roles in 1977’s cult classic The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and the 1983 Stephen King adaptation Cujo, which the E.T. star calls “emotionally and physically the hardest thing I’ve ever done and also the movie I’m proudest of” and reveals that it took 13 dogs to pull off the harrowing attack sequences.

Watch our full interview with Dee Wallace:

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