PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Prior to watching A Blind Bargain, the 2025 film directed by Paul Bunnell, written by Paul and John Falotico, and based on the lost 1922 Lon Chaney film of the same name, I really had no idea what a “lost” film is. The new film, starring Crispin Glover (A River’s Edge; Back to the Future; Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter) and Jake Horowitz (Bones and All), was made without being able to use the original film for inspiration, as it’s been “lost” for over 100 years, and heavily relied on a few photos of Lon Chaney’s character. I thought that was very ambitious and also pretty cool.
Set in 1970, A BLIND BARGAIN reimagines the lost 1922 Lon Chaney silent film of the same name. A desperate young man strikes a dark deal with an unhinged doctor, offering his mother as a subject for the physician’s twisted experiments.
To celebrate the premiere of the film, I chatted with star Crispin about what intrigued him about the film, shooting on film, horror movies, and more!
PopHorror: I had a lot of fun with A Blind Bargain. I’m a big fan so I’m super excited to talk to you today.
Crispin Glover: Great! I have not yet seen the film. I want to see it but tell me. So, you enjoyed it?
PopHorror: I did! I wasn’t familiar with the background or the original film.
Crispin Glover: Probably nobody alive has ever seen it. It was lost, last projected about a hundred or more years ago.
PopHorror: I did a little research on lost films and it’s very interesting. What was it that intrigued you about the script and made you want to be a part of the project?
Crispin Glover: The script did have some enjoyable character aspects and plot twists and turns. But also, the fact that it was being shot on film, which less and less films are being shot, more and more movies are being made digitally. I’m not anti-digital. Digital’s great, but if one can shoot on film, it’s really beautiful. It’s a really beautiful format. They shot it on Super 16. I’m also a filmmaker and I’ve always shot my own films on film. My first two films, What It It?, and It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine were shot on regular 16. Super 16 is when they remove a sprocket and it lets the aspect ratio be a little bit wider. It’s a slightly more rectangular shape. But I had digital intermediates made of those two films that I shot on regular 16, then blew those up to 35mm. Sixteen and Super 16, it really is a great format right now because of two and 4K digital intermediate. Part of what the beauty of film is the grain, so if you’re blowing up a smaller format, you’re seeing the grain even more, and our grains keep getting smaller in 35mm film to the point that it’s almost disappeared. It’s beautiful. Thirty-five is a gold standard, as 16 and Super 16, you can feel the film in it. Because our grains were a little more visible decades ago, it’s almost reflective of what the grain patterns were on 35 mm when shooting on Super 16. I toured from 2005 to 2020 with my first films in the US, Canada, the UK, Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand. For years, I toured with a live show that I perform of books that I’ve made over the years and they’re projected behind me. The images, they’re profusely illustrated. I dramatically narrate these books and then I introduce the feature film and then I have a Q&A and then I have a book signing after. I stopped in 2020. I had my last show in 2020 just before the pandemic happened, and then I had to stop. I decided to wait until… There’s a new film I’ve been working on for many years shot on 35mm negative and I’m going to be at IFC. There’s another venue I’m in talks with that I may premiere at just before that but I’m going to be at the IFC in New York October 10 through at least the 14th. Then I’m going to be in Los Angeles at the Aero Theater through the American Cinematheque on the 18th and 19th of October. Then I’m going to be at the Music Box Theater in Chicago, I believe that’s going to be October 22 and then I’m going to be back in Los Angeles at a yet to be determined date in December at The Egyptian in Hollywood. I’ve played all of the venues except for the Aero. I normally played at The Egyptian before in Los Angeles but the American Cinematheque’s programs both venues. They’re both beautiful venues and now I’m going to be at both on different dates. All of this will be announced on crispinglover.com and people can sign up for the newsletter and it will let people know when I’m where with what films. I talk about this also because I shot on film and A Blind Bargain was shot on film and that was part of the reason why I wanted to be in it. It does make a difference. Again, I’m not anti-digital, but if you can shoot on film, it really is beautiful.
PopHorror: It definitely does add to the experience. I’m not anti-digital either except when they use CGI blood. I much prefer practical effects.
Crispin Glover: Sure. Anything that can be shot practically, if you can, it’s best. I’m not anti-digital effects. If something immerses you into something, great. If it pushes you out, then it’s a problem, so it’s really just how is the technique being applied? Digitally, is it able to be told? If it pushes the audience out and lets it be less immersive. And I agree. Sometimes I’m pushed out because of digital. But I’ve also seen things that I can tell it had to be digital but it didn’t push me out and it was actually helpful. Just depends on how it’s applied. But yeah, if something can be done practically, that almost always is both better and probably less expensive than doing it digitally as well.
PopHorror: Was there anything that you were adamant about bringing to your character?
Crispin Glover: Well, I had a Zoom meeting with Paul after I’d looked at the script, and I knew that he had made films on film previously and that he had a certain passion for a certain kind of genre filmmaking, so I respected that. He’s a very easy fella to talk to and work with. I liked working with Paul a lot. Of course, the film is no longer extent. I don’t know when the original film was lost exactly – I’m forgetting the exact year – I think early 20s, 1924 or something like that. All there are are a few photographs. I love Lon Chaney. He’s truly remarkable. Really nobody has done the specific kind of work that he did with his body, makeup, the depth of his work. It’s something, it really is remarkable. My favorite performance of his is in the film that I’ve seen. Who knows with so many lost. Ninety percent of all silent films are gone. The silver content was more valuable to get out of the film being melted down, because they didn’t have any market for replaying it. It was just considered like a play. You’d show it and then production was over and that was it. So if you think of film that way, if there was silver content, they could get money for the silver so 90% of all silent films and even early pre-code films, well mostly silent films, they’re gone. So all there are are some photographs of him. He played two parts, which he would do in some of his films – a doctor character, which is along the lines of what I’m playing in this film, and he played some kind of creature man. I’m sure it would be interesting. I’d love to see what he was doing. Always did something physically unusual and very interesting work. But we discussed certain things about the character. If there was something I could glean from Lon Chaney, fantastic, but the script was written to be 1970, 1971, so that’s a very different era. The look of Lon Chaney, he looked like maybe a European, maybe a German doctor with a goatee, maybe a monocle, I’m kind of forgetting right now, but something of the period. It didn’t really make sense to try to get that look or feel for a 1970 or 1971 character, so it made more sense to go to the era and think about what the delivery of this kind of performance could be within that era. That’s something Paul and I discussed a little bit. There were some things about dialogue and stuff we discussed. There were always interesting things in the writing that were enjoyable to play.
PopHorror: That’s really sad about silent films.
Crispin Glover: Yeah!
PopHorror: There’s no getting those back.
Crispin Glover: They find them every once in a while. I regularly will go to silent film festivals. They’re finding, every year, there’s new… They’ll have premieres. I like to go to MoMA in New York and they’ll have a film premiere in New York that hasn’t been seen in over 100 years. Some of them are newly founded, of course. Maybe one of the most famous restorations is Metropolis. I remember seeing it in the 80s, which was not too much longer than 60 minutes. I don’t think it was even 90 minutes, maybe 80 minutes. Not too much footage was around, and then Georgio Moroder made one in 1984, which I went to see in the movie theater, which they had little bits of restoration. He played with sound effects, music. He did some kind of restoration work, which some of it was interesting, but then they found a print of it in South America, 16mm kind of destroyed so they… Even still, it might not be complete but it’s hours now, hours long. One of the best screenings I’ve ever seen was the original score being played at a building that’s now torn down at LACMA, it was called The Bing Theater. They’re building a new LA County Art Museum and they tore down this Bing Theater, which I saw some beautiful films there. But I saw Metropolis, I believe the name of the organist was Neil Israel, playing the original score on the organ. It was one of the best cinematic experiences I’ve ever had. It was fantastic. That makes such a difference as to what the score is for a silent film, and what instrument they’re using. They have the DVD out, which has the original score of Metropolis, but this organ playing the original score… When you’re seeing an organ, it vibrates in your body. It’s a whole different experience than watching something on DVD at home with the original score, which I would still recommend because it’s a beautiful film but seeing that in person with the organ with the original score, it was something. Really something.
PopHorror: That sounds really amazing. You’re no stranger to horror. We’ve all seen Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. What brings you back to the genre?
Crispin Glover: Well, people ask me about that. I’m not genre specific, it’s really more if a genre chooses me rather than the other way round. I was saying to somebody else that probably the genre I personally would be most attracted to is a genre that is not economic and hardly anybody works in it, although really good filmmakers use it, which is surrealism. Someone like Stanley Kubrick will use surrealism to an extent in his filmmaking. This is where people can end up interpreting things for themselves. It’s fantastic. I love that as an audience member. I would like to be in more films but there’s something about the genre, particularly about horror. Horror’s probably the safest genre for investors to invest in because there are avid horror fans that as long as there’s gore, so to speak – could be other things – they will watch whether it’s got bad performances, bad production design, so on some level, investors… Most movies lose money but maybe it’s slightly safer to invest in horror than others so there might be more horror around. And for whatever reason, people will come to me and if there’s something interesting, something playable that I can enjoy to play and hopefully people can enjoy to watch, then sure, I’ll do that. But I’m not out to pick the horror genre, but I’m also not against the horror genre. I’ve enjoyed certain films. It’s really not the thing I tend toward veering towards, but I tend towards liking some of the early pre-codes. I do think Boris Karloff’s performance in the original Frankenstein is a beautiful performance, as is Lanchester in the sequel, also a beautiful performance. In the original Dracula, Dwight Frye, who played Renfield, did a terrific performance. The genre can lead to interesting things. And there’s more modern ones. Isabell Adjani in The Possession gave a tremendous performance. Shelley Duvall and Jack Nicholson are both great in The Shining. I was talking about the objective correlative to somebody else, the subtext of what’s really going on, The Shining is a horror film, the horror genre, but really it deals with many things. Famously, it’s a film that’s been interpreted many ways, partially because Kubrick is such a great filmmaker using surrealistic aspects where things can be interpreted by multiple people multiple different ways. But that film pretty clearly has an actual story that has something to do with abuse within a family and that is truly horrifying. But then there’s the spooky aspects above that, something deeply wrong is going on underneath all of it as well.
Thank you so much to Crispin for taking the time to speak with us. A Blind Bargain had its world premiere at FrightFest on August 25, 2025!
