Why Kevin Costner Thinks His Only Horror Movie Is Closer to Field of Dreams Than You’d Expect

Kevin Costner once lined up two of his most different movies and said, basically, yeah, these are the same problem. On paper that sounds nuts: one is the heartfelt baseball fantasy that still gets dads misty, the other is a grim little horror movie about a family stalked by something ancient. But after hearing him out, I kind of get what he meant — and also why only one of them landed.

The unlikely connection Costner sees

Back in 2008, talking to Bloody-Disgusting (as picked up by Slash Film), Costner compared his supernatural horror The New Daughter to his beloved Field of Dreams. He has built a career on Westerns and sports dramas — especially baseball — so drawing a line between ghosts in a cornfield and nasty things lurking in the woods is, at minimum, eyebrow-raising.

"It's very much like 'Field of Dreams' in the sense that we didn't know if we could pull off 'Field of Dreams.' We didn't know if people were going to, ultimately, at the end of the day, buy people coming out of the corn, have Burt Lancaster step over that line and not be able to go back, and be moved by that."

What he's getting at: both movies are big swings. If you don't sell the reality of the premise, the whole thing collapses into goofy. Audience buy-in is the ballgame. One film pulled off the impossible sentimentally; the other asked viewers to accept Costner as a dad out of his depth against inhuman folklore — and that's a tougher sell.

So why didn't The New Daughter take off?

The New Daughter hit theaters in 2009 and never found traction. It's a downbeat supernatural thriller about a father and his kids facing off with something old and hungry, and it let Costner play more vulnerable than audiences were used to seeing him. That mismatch didn't help. Critics also dinged the pacing, said the plot felt thin, and the ending left a lot of people cold with how ambiguous it is.

Field of Dreams (1989), on the other hand, had an emotional throughline you can explain in one sentence and feel in your bones. Even with the risk of "baseball ghosts walk out of corn," the movie delivers such a clean, universal payoff that people happily went with it. Costner is right that both projects asked for a leap of faith. Only one stuck the landing.

• The New Daughter (2009): Rotten Tomatoes 40% critics | 24% audience; worldwide gross $579K (Box Office Mojo)
• Field of Dreams (1989): Rotten Tomatoes 88% critics | 86% audience; worldwide gross $84.5M (Box Office Mojo)

Where to watch

The New Daughter is streaming on Prime. Field of Dreams is available to rent or buy on Amazon in the US.