The horror movie that utterly terrified Kevin Costner: “I started screaming”

While it’s caused his career to hit the skids more than once, Kevin Costner should at least be commended for sticking to his guns and forging a path through Hollywood driven largely by one overriding sentiment: making movies that Kevin Costner would want to see.

When it works, it really works, as the multi-time Academy Award-winning Dances with Wolves can attest. When it doesn’t, though, that’s when the shit hits the fan. Nobody believed in Waterworld and The Postman more than Costner, and he was the one who took the brunt of the blame when they combined to knock him from the A-list perch he’d occupied for a decade.

The jury remains out on Horizon, mostly because the first part of his planned four-film saga is the only one that’s been released, the second remains in limbo, and the last two are nowhere near being finished, but that’s more than enough evidence to indicate that Costner has flown too close to the sun again.

Costner was one of Hollywood’s biggest and highest-paid stars in his pomp, which is nothing if not curious. He was incredibly popular throughout the 1980s and 1990s, which he managed in spite of being found sorely lacking in the charisma department. He’s a good actor but not a great one, and neither is he a genuinely captivating presence that audiences can’t take their eyes off.

As mentioned, part of the reason he became such a big deal is that he knew what kind of films he wanted to star in. Once he got his foot in the door, he knew exactly what type of pictures audiences wanted to see him in, too. He was old-fashioned and stoic Americana repackaged for the modern age, which is why horror has never been his bag.

In his four-decade career, he’s made exactly one straightforward movie, which nobody remembers because Luis Berdejo’s 2009 effort The New Daughter was crap and it went straight to video. He’s only made one supernatural movie, too, with Tom Shadyac’s Dragonfly dying a death at the box office and taking a critical pasting.

Costner and horror simply don’t go together, but even though his forays into the genre have been uniformly shite, he’ll never forget the scary movie that scarred him for life. He was only nine years old when Robert Aldrich’s Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte was released, and he’ll never forget it.

“As soon as that head started bouncing down the stairs,” he reflected to Cowboys & Indians of the scene where a disembodied dome starts causing havoc in the midst of a feud between Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland’s country-living cousins with dark secrets. “I started screaming.”

A young Costner would then flee from the theatre to ensure he never made it to the end credits, and he probably never bothered finding out what happened next. Not to dish out spoilers for a movie released in 1964, but Davis gets arrested for blackmail and murder.