(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 12 October 2025 20:45, UK
Heroic moments of dusty duelling, flying arrows or genuinely courageous characters are what you might generally connect to Kevin Costner. Horror, however, isn’t one of them. In fact, the iconic star has always been honest that he hates being scared as a viewer, so horror is generally off the menu.
Having said that, in the 2000s, Costner flirted a couple of times with movies that were horror-adjacent, perhaps in an effort to diversify his career as he entered his second decade as a major movie star. First up, he made 2002’s Dragonfly, a supernatural thriller about a doctor being contacted from beyond the grave by his dead wife, through the medium of his patients’ near-death experiences.
In the wake of the enormous success of M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense in 1999, a project like this probably sounded like a good bet for a leading man looking to reinvent himself. Unfortunately, the movie was dull as dishwater, and was quickly forgotten by the small number of people who saw it. Still, Costner must have seen something promising in pushing the boundaries of his usual genres, as in 2007, he starred as an honest-to-goodness serial killer in the psychological thriller Mr Brooks.
Playing dead-eyed psychopath Earl Brooks, also known as The Thumbprint Killer, might actually be the biggest swing Costner has ever taken in his esteemed career. A pitch-black thriller filled with twists and turns, has Costner throwing himself into the role, delivering a truly memorable modern villain, for those who bothered to see it.
After two unsuccessful attempts at dipping his toe into darker territory, you’d think Costner would have returned to the warm embrace of a western or historical epic. Instead, he doubled down and finally went full steam ahead into horror with 2009’s The New Daughter. In this low-budget chiller, Costner played a divorcee who moves to an old house in rural California with his two daughters. A house that happens to have a burial ground beside it. Oh, and the previous person who lived there disappeared without a trace.
By the time Costner finds himself battling the vicious ancient creatures that emerge from the dirt of the burial mound near his new gaff, it’s hard not to wonder just what the hell someone like Kevin Costner is doing in such a balls-to-the-wall horror flick, especially one that is, putting it politely, not very good. Well, it’s because Costner didn’t only think it was good; he actually wondered if he and director Luis Berdejo had made something that would stand the test of time. “Hopefully we’ve made a little classic,” Costner admitted to Bloody Disgusting. “I don’t know if we did, but that’s what we were trying to do.”
For Costner, despite The New Daughter being part of a genre he wouldn’t choose to watch of his own accord, he felt the story took risks that could pay off big time if they were executed well. He even likened the film to his classic 1989 fantasy about a farmer whose baseball field attracts the ghosts of legends of the sport. “I’ll say this and it will sound odd: It’s very much like Field of Dreams, in the sense that we didn’t know if we could pull off Field of Dreams,” Costner explained. “We didn’t know if people were going to ultimately, at the end of the day, buy people coming out of the corn…and be moved by that.” Costner and his creative partners did waht any creative should do and took the chance, because they felt the writing was so good.
That bet, sadly for those involved, didn’t pay off.
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