INTERVIEW: CHRIS BICKEL, writer/director PATER NOSTER & THE MISSION OF LIGHT – June 2025

INTERVIEW: CHRIS BICKEL, writer/director PATER NOSTER & THE MISSION OF LIGHT – June 2025
By Shane Pinnegar

PATER NOSTER & THE MISSION OF LIGHT is the new film by South Carolina, USA writer/director Chris Bickel – a wild ride that takes us from an independent record store to a hippy commune to demonic hyper death cult mayhem. It screens as part of Perth’s Revelation International Film Festival on Friday, 4th July at 9:30pm at Luna Cinemas, Leederville.

Bickel successfully captured the geekiness of record store life by writing what he knows: he’s worked in record stores most of his life and the dialogue and characters populating his film on both side of the counter will be familiar to all record collectors.

“Behind the counter we keep a book where we record ridiculous things customers say. A lot of the dialogue in that opening scene is lifted straight from the book,” he explains. “Record stores are weirdo magnets, so there’s a lot of good material there. I could have made a whole record store hangout movie that was nothing but weird customer interactions — but I don’t think anyone would pay to see it.”

As for the supernatural bloodbath which follows, that came about more by convenience than personal experience.

“When you make “no budget” movies, you write to the things you have access to. In this case, I have a couple of friends who fix up old cars — they supplied the cars for my prior film BAD GIRLS. They told me they had acquired an old school bus which they planned to paint like a 60s hippy bus… like the Ken Kesey “Further” bus. So I wrote the movie around the record store I had access to and this bus. I figured it had to be about a cult.

“A few of the situations in the movie came directly from dreams, so it was fun trying to translate something nonsensical from the dreamworld into real life. I think everyone has disturbing thoughts whether they admit it or not. For me, I enjoy releasing those in a creative way. I don’t think I’m really abnormal — which is totally something a truly abnormal person would say.”

As record store clerk Max and her friends are targeted by the Mission Of Light cult, there are buckets of blood and all manner of gross-out horror effects. Bickel reveals that there’s no CGI involved, only practical special effects – but this involved a huge problem when a crucial demon baby model, named The Aleph, wasn’t supplied on time as promised.

“We are all in on practical FX. Our team did an amazing job on the cheap [with] a lot of low-budget improvising. The castration scene was done with a pig’s tail we bought at the grocery store. The store was out of turkey necks, which was our first choice.

“Someone else was originally doing the baby and it kept not being ready. And so we kept moving shotlists around and rescheduling shoot days, which is tough to do when you are on such a tiny budget and have a fairly large cast of cult members. We came to the final shoot day and the baby still wasn’t ready. I had a mini-breakdown, composed myself, and then figured out how to “shoot around” the baby — which was supposed to be the main centerpiece effect of the whole movie.

“We wrapped production and then I reached out to Joe Castro to see if he could do it. He was on another production so there was a waiting period before we received his amazing prop – he is a genius and that build came out of his head, the only guidance I gave him was that I wanted something in the same vein as the baby from IT’S ALIVE.

“A couple of months later I shot all the parts with the baby and prayed it would cut together OK. I think it did. It’s some of the editing I’m most proud of because it shouldn’t have worked at all.”

As may be obvious already, PATER NOSTER & THE MISSION OF LIGHT starts in a record store, Max obsessing about a wish list record, then flips halfway through into something very different indeed, a la From Dusk Til Dawn. Bickel says he was keen to make things seem pretty ordinary and then shocking viewers.

“I like movies that make a major tonal shift like that — AUDITION is the first one that comes to mind, FROM DUSK TIL DAWN is definitely another. I think keeping the first half lighthearted helps to connect the audience with the characters, so they aren’t just rando teens for the gristmill. You care about them.”

The young cast includes Adara Starr as Max and Josh Outzen as Jay Sin, actors without a lot of experience but who delivered excellent performances with little budget behind them.

“Adara, who played Max, was a blessing to work with,” Bickel offers. “I think this was her first “real” role and she was cast as a last minute replacement after the first Max dropped out. Josh Outzen who played Jay Sin was so great. He sent me a reel of some work he did on other indies and I told him he was “too good for our production.” I’m glad he decided to do it!”

Also featuring is Tim Cappello, who eighties fans will immediately recognise as Tina Turner’s sax player back in the day, and the oiled up bodybuilding sax player in the beach concert scene of another cult horror favourite, The Lost Boys.

“It was amazing to work with Timmy Cappello, who most people know as “the sexy sax guy from THE LOST BOYS,” Bickel admitted, before explaining the vibe on set as he was killing his cast off one by one.

“The kill scenes were always the most positive because everyone loves being killed on screen – and, usually, there’s no dialogue to remember during the death scenes. We kept a hose and kiddie pool on set so everyone could wash the fake blood off between takes — as it did feel nasty sticky in the heat. But, overall, I think everybody loves to be doused in fake blood.”

There’s an electric punk attitude throughout PATER NOSTER & THE MISSION OF LIGHT – indeed, punk and metal are a very tight fit with horror films in general, and with a low budget, DIY aesthetic. Bickel agrees that his filmmaking style has been influenced by his time playing in punk bands and working in record stores?

“Everything I do is informed by punk rock. Playing in bands, doing recordings, putting out records on my own label, doing zines, booking tours, all of that — the whole DIY thing. That’s what taught me how to make movies. That and YouTube. All the education you need is there. At the end of the credits I dedicate this movie “To Punk Rock.” It saved my life and taught me everything I know about how the world works. There’s a confidence in not having to be perfect — that’s a great lesson to take from punk.”

Bickel is obviously proud of his film – made for just US$21,000, less than the cost of a second-hand car, he wrote in the credits – and excited that on the other side of the world, a West Australian film festival is screening it.

“Getting a movie outside my home state is a big deal to me,” he says, humbly. “Getting it outside of the US is a dream come true. Australia has such a rich history of great genre cinema, so it’s an honour to be screened Down Under. Screening outside the US means a lot to me — I’d like people to see that the US is not all Marvel movies and the stupid actions of our government.”

There’s a scene in the movie of someone trying to sell a secondhand copy of Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream & Other Delights, a record which sold over six million copies in the US in the mid-Sixties. I was surprised to discover that Bickel has hundreds of copies of that one record and asked him to explain that particular obsession.

“The 90’s were the heyday of buying records in thrift stores because so many people bought CDs and ditched their vinyl collections. So you found SO MUCH good shit. But in scouring the racks, you’d inevitably see several copies of “Whipped Cream and Other delights.” It was ubiquitous. At some point I thought it would be funny to try and take that record “out of circulation” so I started buying it any time I saw it for a dollar or less. And now I have a stupidly large collection of this one record. In my hometown of Columbia, SC it is actually scarce. Everyplace else in the US there are still thousands of them!”

As a record collector myself, I tell Chris that I loved the line about Max having found records in the wild and rescued them. That, and other touches like the sign on the record store wall saying “the plural of vinyl is ‘vinyl’” really speaks to vinyl obsessives.”

“Absolutely,” he agrees. “I wanted it to be a love letter to everyone who has ever worked in a record store. It’s a great niche to be in. You’ve got HIGH FIDELITY, EMPIRE RECORDS, RECORD CITY and now my movie.”

 

Category: Interviews