When Kevin Costner Thought He Made a Classic — But It Was His Worst Movie Instead

When you think of Kevin Costner, you probably picture wide-open plains, heroic duels, flying arrows, or stoic, principled characters. Horror? Not so much. The iconic actor has openly admitted he doesn’t enjoy being scared, so the genre has rarely made its way into his filmography.

Still, during the 2000s, Costner dabbled—just a little—in horror-adjacent projects, perhaps in an effort to stretch his range as he entered his third decade in Hollywood. His first real step in that direction came with 2002’s Dragonfly, a supernatural thriller where he plays a grieving doctor who begins receiving mysterious messages from his late wife—through his near-death-experience patients. Riding on the coattails of the success of The Sixth Sense (1999), the film might have seemed like a safe pivot. But in reality, Dragonfly was lifeless, unmemorable, and quickly forgotten.

Undeterred, Costner tried again in 2007 with Mr. Brooks, taking a much bigger risk. This time, he went full dark, portraying a seemingly normal man who leads a double life as a calculating serial killer. Playing Earl Brooks, a.k.a. The Thumbprint Killer, Costner gave one of the boldest performances of his career. The film is a twisted psychological thriller, and while it didn’t make a huge splash at the box office, it left a strong impression on those who saw it—largely thanks to Costner’s icy, disturbing performance.

Instead of returning to his comfort zone of historical dramas or westerns, Costner pushed forward into even more unfamiliar territory. In 2009, he went all in on horror with The New Daughter, a low-budget film that saw him playing a recently divorced father who moves into an old countryside home with his two children. Naturally, there’s a creepy burial mound next to the house—and just as naturally, strange things start happening.

Before long, Costner’s character is up against ancient, violent creatures crawling out from the earth. Watching a serious actor like Costner try to anchor such an outlandish horror plot is jarring—especially since The New Daughter is, to put it mildly, not a great film.

But here’s the twist: Costner didn’t just believe in the movie—he actually thought it might become a cult classic. “Hopefully we’ve made a little classic,” he told Bloody Disgusting in an interview. “I don’t know if we did, but that’s what we were trying to do.”

Despite his general dislike of horror, Costner saw potential in the story. He even compared it to Field of Dreams, the 1989 film that became one of his most beloved. “I’ll say this, and it’ll 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,” he said. “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.”

Like any artist taking a chance, Costner followed what he believed was a strong script and a creative vision worth risking. Unfortunately, The New Daughter didn’t resonate with audiences or critics—and whatever hopes he had of making a “little classic” faded quickly after its release.