Featured Conversation: Pater Noster and the Mission of Light: a Horror Movie And an Ode to Records

Published on Feb 21, 2025

Today on IHTOV: correspondent Owen Brazas sat down for an interview with Christopher Bickel, director of the horror movie Pater Noster and the Mission of Light. The film is a much a horror tale as it is a love letter to vinyl and record stores.

The film tells the story of Max, a young record store clerk who stumbles upon a rare vinyl LP and is drawn into the world of a 1970s hippie commune. An invitation to the remnants of the outlandish cult and their unholy spawn leads to grave and grisly circumstances for Max and her friends. You can watch the trailer here.

First of all, I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed your film. As someone who has spent a lot of time at record stores and divey punk/hardcore spaces, the first act felt very authentic to my experience. The characters all feel like real people you could bump into in these spaces, but not only that they are the type you can see going to great lengths for music. Can you tell me a little about your time in record stores, working or as a customer, and share a memorable experience with a customer/clerk?

I’ve actually been working in record stores most of my life. I got a job at a place called Manifest Discs and Tapes when I was in college. Worked there a few years, then opened my own shop called New Clear Days which mostly sold punk and indie rock. I ran that store for five years and closed it to start making movies. I bought a bunch of gear and a week or so into shooting my first film, all of my gear was stolen along with all the footage I’d shot. It sent me spiraling into a year-long-depression and when I came out the other side, I ended up taking a job at Papa Jazz Record Shoppe which is where I’ve worked to this day. It continues to be the “day job” I’ve been advised by movie critics not to quit! Some of my memorable experiences as a clerk are in the movie! A lot of the dialogue, including the whole “Bahadu” encounter are all taken from real life.

Can you tell me about a record you found in a weird spot, like a thrift store, garage sale, or non-traditional record store?

I’m always extremely lucky with thrift finds. Of course, the heyday of thrifting was right before eBay became a thing. Everyone was ditching their vinyl collections for CDs and the thrift stores were ripe with cheap rarities that amateurs couldn’t look up on the internet yet. But one specific find helped inspire the movie. I scored a Yahowa 13 album for a buck at a local thrift and that led me to learning a lot more about The Source Family which was a major inspiration for the cult in the movie. 

In my experience, punk and the DIY spirit carries over quite well to true indie/low budget filmmaking. I grew up working on films on16mm, and there were so many hurdles you had to clear just to gather enough money to buy film to shoot a short. Then you had to find people that were competent to actual working the camera, handle the film, work a nagra and microphone AND show up to work with little to no pay on a wild idea. Can you speak to how technology has helped you out and (speaking for myself) how not to do EVERYTHING yourself and not burn out?

I wanted to be a filmmaker in college and that was the era of 16mm film. Some people shot on video, but it definitely didn’t look like “real movies.” I couldn’t afford the gateway to entry for shooting on film. You’d be looking at like $50K just for film and processing before you even started to think about paying actors. The first time I decided I wanted to quit the record store life to become a filmmaker was right about the time desktop editing became a thing. I bought a DV camera that was pretty good for the time but still wasn’t very “cinematic.” Then after shooting a week and having my gear stolen, I went back to working in a record store for many years. Until I started to see people making movies that looked like they were shot on film – but were actually shot on inexpensive DSLR cameras. A local friend of mine shot a movie for around $10K that got distribution and that inspired me to go ahead and take a second swing at filmmaking. The advent of cheap technology opened it all up. Someone like me could actually afford to shoot something and have it look relatively decent. It was a game changer. Being able to edit on a cheap computer was also a game changer. Not to mention the avenues for distribution opened up by the internet.

To the second part of your question it IS easy to get burned out when you’re “doing everything,” but working at the budget level I am, I can’t afford to pay a lot of crew members. Total budget for PATER NOSTER was $21K and that paid for the actors, the food to feed them and the special effects. So I’m lighting, shooting, directing, editing, coloring, sound mixing, pretty much everything. It’s not by design and I’m not a megalomaniac. I wish I had the money to give some of these jobs away to other people! 

Your ensemble of actors were all-round excellent; often times you can have a really cool premise for a horror film, but the cast can feel like meat for the grinder. In your film it does not feel that way, you like these characters for the most part. Josh Outzen who plays Jay Sin for example, is completely believable as a Blackened Thrash drummer (and the band playing is actually a Blackened Thrash band!), like the dude totally looks like a drummer, not sure if I would have bought him as a bass player. I know you have worked with several of the cast previously, can you speak to how you found your cast? Was it hard for you to communicate the tone you were after or were they kinda music heads too?

The band “Lunacide” in the movie was played by a real band called “Demiser.” All except for the drummer, who was my actor Josh. But I loosely based the character of “Jay Sin” on the real-life drummer of Demiser. I think Josh’s personal background is pretty far removed from Blackened Thrash Metal drumming, so he really did a lot of work to make that sell. Same really with the other cast members. Adara made a lot of my stilted nerd dialogue believable, even though I think she’s from a different world. I did my best to explain to the actors what all the references were and what they meant. Much of the rest of the cast are people I had worked with before in my previous feature BAD GIRLS. I don’t think any of them really come from the record collector world, so they all were doing their best to sell it. The most important thing to me was making them likable for what I assumed the audience would be. So I tried to remain cognizant of that while directing them. Which isn’t easy when you’re also shooting them and trying to keep them in-frame and in-focus! 

We need to talk about the man, the myth, the legend, Tim Cappello. How did his participation come about?

First, I need to say what a treat it is to work with Tim! Just the coolest, most down-to-earth, sweetest dude. I used to write for a website called “Dangerous Minds” and I managed to get an interview with him several years ago for that site. We hit it off and I was taken aback by what a thoughtful and smart guy he was. We remained in contact ever since and I just shot my shot and asked him if he would be in my dinky little movie and he said “yes.” Having that prior relationship helped I’m sure. But, my god, the guy is just so incredibly cool. He did us a huge favor by agreeing to be in it! 

Hippies, why do they make such excellent villains?

I think one of the reasons is that we have a well-documented historical record of their existence and what they stood for and a record of all the ways the major players in the movement sold out and became one of the most insufferable generations in history. There’s a meme I once saw that I felt rang true: “Hippies are mean people pretending to be nice and punks are nice people pretending to be mean.” Every generation sucks though when you get down to it. Because, as Deja Venus states in the movie: “people, in general, are assholes.” 

Max’s place, was that location yours, a friend’s, or did you put that record collection together for the movie?

Max’s bedroom is my record room in my house. We just threw a bed into the middle of the floor to make it look like a bedroom. Most of the movie was shot in and around my house. All of the ritual chamber scenes are a set we built in a shed in my backyard. It’s Little Rascals style filmmaking at its best (or worst). 

If someone who only knew you through interviews or your films came over to your place and poked through your records what do you think they would come away thinking? Any surprise genres that people would not expect you to love?

I LOVE so much music. So most genres are represented. I have a pretty huge section of 20th Century Classical that lives separately from the main bulk of my collection which is mostly rock/r&b, and punk. My jazz tastes tend to run pretty avant-garde. I have a pretty huge section in a separate room that is all like exotica and moog records. The part of my collection that raises the most eyebrows is I have over 500 copies of “Whipped Cream and Other Delights. (I’m not joking). It’s a sickness and the movie itself is an indictment of myself and that sickness. 

What have you been listening to lately/what was the last record you bought?

The most recent record I bought is an old Brian Eno live bootleg. I recently bought a collection for the shop of 80s new wave that edges toward the experimental and a lot of it got added to my collection. So a lot of Psychic TV, Einstürzende Neubauten, DAF, and that kind of stuff. My listening room has mostly been like SPROCKETS lately! 

A low budget + problems always = creative solutions. Was there a “thing” on the film that almost didn’t come together but with ingenuity or creative planning you pulled it off?

The “Aleph” which is the demonic baby in the movie wasn’t ready when we needed it on the designated shoot day. And then it kept not being ready and we ran out of shoot days. So we had to completely shoot “around” it. I ended up needing to bring in a different FX person to create the baby prop and that took several months from when we’d wrapped. So all of the stuff with the baby had to be shot as pick-ups many months after the cast was no longer available. It was a real trick to edit that stuff in and make it look like all of it was happening together in the same room. I look back on it and I kind of impressed myself with how seamlessly it flows together. 

When watching I kept thinking about records and movies that maybe weren’t perfect or polished but I loved for those very reasons. Can you remember a “click” moment while engaging with film or music that made you go, “I can do this to!”

I’ve always been obsessed with low budget movies. Especially horror. So I’ve always had a major affinity for people like George Romero, Sam Raimi, Roger Corman, and HG Lewis who could make magic on a shoestring. And I came out of Punk Rock playing in bands. So the DIY spirit came directly from that. Learning how to record and release records, do zines, book tours, and everything else without the backing of a record company. Making movies on my level is like recording a punk rock demo tape. Except it’s kind of like recording 10 different demo tapes all at the same time with the level of work involved. 

Finally, is there a record out there that you would face potential oblivion for? 

For the longest time my holy grail record was “Pay To Cum” by the Bad Brains. But I ended up thrifting a Ronnie and the Relatives 45 for 25 cents which I flipped on eBay for over $1000 and I took that Paypal mad money and bought myself an original “Pay To Cum.” This was back when you could still get one of those for $1000! The two Fix 7 inches are probably the top of my wantlist now. But I don’t think there’s any record I want so much that I’d run back into the cult compound to grab like Max does in the movie!

Bickel’s CV includes stints as a columnist for MaximumRockNRoll magazine and Dangerous Minds. He was also singer in the punk bands In/Humanity and Guyana Punch Line, as well as the brains behind prolific avant-garde recording project Anakrid.

Bickel works in underground genre films.

I Have That on Vinyl is a reader supported publication. If you enjoy what’s going on here please consider donating to the site’s writer fund: venmo // paypal