Wallace opens up about what changes over the course of a career and how her approach, in particular, has evolved
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NEED TO KNOW
- Dee Wallace wants to make horror with deeper meaning and she’s made it a priority in her career
- The 77-year-old actress tells PEOPLE about what she thinks about when she’s considering a horror role
- Wallace earned her scream queen title through films including The Stepford Wives, The Hills Have Eyes, The Howling, and Cujo
Dee Wallace is proud of her place in the horror community.
It’s for that reason that the actress, 77, is careful and considerate when picking roles. Wallace recently caught up with PEOPLE, where she opened up about the different considerations she’s developed while working in the genre.
“I didn’t go looking for horror. Horror found me,” she tells PEOPLE. “I guess I’m just a really good screamer and crier. And that’s what it takes to do a lot of this horror-thriller stuff, you know?”
Wallace’s first horror movies were 1975’s The Stepford Wives and 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes. She recalls, “You know, back then it was, ‘Oh, my gosh. How lucky am I? I have a job.’ ”
Bryan Forbes’ Stepford Wives was a warm-up for Wallace, who played a maid in the psychological thriller about a neighborhood of eerily subservient housewives. Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes follows the Carters, a family traveling together when they find themselves stranded in the desert, in an area occupied by a community that cannibalizes and robs travelers.
“Now I would stand back and go, ‘Wow, how much violence is there?’ ” Wallace admits of the latter film’s extreme nature.
The actress explains that she’s become more cautious about how horror plays out on screen, noting, “I just signed on for a project where we stopped before I signed on and talked about the violence. They addressed the violence and toned down some of it because it’s not really my wheelhouse.”
She continued, “If you look at a lot of the films that I do in the horror genre, they do have a story and they do develop the characters and the relationships of the characters. It’s not just a set them up, take them out kind of thing,” she explains. “So now I address that more than I did then. Back then, it was just thrilling to get a lead part in a film and get your career started.”
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Wallace is grateful for a career that has felt like “kismet.”
“My life is kismet. That’s all I can say. I’ve just attracted the people that were supposed to be there at the right time, down to all these little independent films that I’ve done,” she shares.
As for what’s next? “I just keep attracting beautiful people into my life, and beautiful circumstances. And it does keep going. I’ve got six or seven films coming out.”
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