Earlier this year, while scrolling through Night Flight (the only streamer worth a paid subscription), I stumbled across a movie called Pater Noster and the Mission of Light. A horror movie about the hunt for a possibly cursed record made by a cult in the ‘70s, it was full of vinyl nerd in-jokes, references to the Source Family, the Merry Pranksters and Whipped Cream and Other Delights. I was smitten with it.
Directed by Christopher Bickel, Pater Noster is a wild ride through dusty record bins and into the strange, terrifying world of a fictional psychedelic cult. The film, made with a budget of just $21,000, is also an exercise in resourcefulness. “We do these movies on such a low budget, so when I go to write it, I have to write to things that I have access to,” says Bickel on a recent video call, “things that I think would elevate the production value, to make it look like we spent money on this thing or that thing.”
Since Bickel, who is based in Columbia, South Carolina, works at a record store, he knew he had access to the shop as a location. And since he has been working at record stores since college, he also has a pretty impressive vinyl collection that could be used in the film. “I make very little money working at a record store, but the one thing that I do get is first pick of all the cool records,” he says.
Then there was the bus. Bickel’s friends refurbish old cars and he had previously used some of them in his film Bad Girls. “They told me that they had just acquired a school bus and that they wanted to paint it like an old hippie bus, like the Ken Kesey Further bus,” he recalls. The friends said Bickel could have the bus if there was a need for it. “I wrote the movie around a bus,” he says. “So, this bus is the whole reason the movie exists.”
So, Bickel had to tie together the idea of a hippie cult movie with the record store. “I thought the way to do that would be to take from something like the Source Family, who I am huge into,” he says, referencing the L.A.-based cult who had a vegetarian restaurant on Sunset Blvd. and a band called Ya Ho Wa 13. “I actually thrifted Source Family records,” says Bickel. “I’m bringing stuff that I know into it.”
There were other influences too, like Timothy Leary, the Process Church and maybe a pinch of the Manson Family. “It was just a way to weave in the record thing into a cult,” he says. “I knew that it was going to be a horror movie, so I knew that I was going to have to figure out a way to make a lot of crazy violence, using the stuff that I had easy access to that I didn’t have to pay money for.”
One of my favorite gags in the movie involves the Herb Alpert record Whipped Cream and Other Delights, which, if you do a lot of crate digging, you’ve seen in the wild many, many times. “I think there’s a little bit of a confirmation bias because everybody thinks that’s the most ubiquitous record, but there are those Firestone Christmas albums and Mantovani records, probably the same amount of them are out there, but you just notice the Herb Alpert one because that cover is so striking,” Bickel says. “So, every time you see that green cover with that woman covered in whipped cream, it just jumps out at you.”
Still, Bickel has been amassing copies of the album since the 1990s. “When I would be thrifting for stuff, Whipped Cream and Other Delights was every third record. They were everywhere,” he says. “On one hand, I found it annoying, but on the other hand, the cover is so awesome and it’s probably one of my favorite record covers of all time. I decided then that I was going to try to take that record out of circulation and so I said that if I see it and it’s a dollar or less, I’ll buy it.”
Adding to the world-building of the movie, Bickel also got a band together. “When I first came up with the concept of the movie and I knew that it was going to be this cult and they were going to have a band, the first thing that I did is that I got a bunch of friends together, local musicians, and we wrote an entire album of music,” he says. There’s more music than when you’ll hear in the music. In fact, the soundtrack album is released as a double-vinyl set, with one of the records being the Pater Noster and the Mission of Light album. It’s a fantastic collection of psychedelic songs with a ‘70s vintage feel to them. It’s also available as digital files, which Bickel says he’ll send to anyone who messages him via Instagram or Facebook about the Pater Noster songs. “I would love for more people to know about that,” he says.
The movie itself came together thanks to a crowdfunding campaign. Bickel also personally emailed record stores across the country about the film and around 40 shops contributed funds towards the production. The logos for those stores appear in the credits. With a micro-budget, Bickel was able to make sure that everyone was paid and fed. He also did a lot of the work himself. “Not by choice,” he adds. “It was actually really awful, but when that’s the amount of money you have, then you have to shoot the thing yourself and you have to edit and direct and everything else.”
Bickel background in punk bands— he has played with In/Humanity and Guyana Punchline and had the solo project Anakrid— contributes to how he approaches DIY filmmaking. “When I was in bands, we did our own recordings, we started our own label, put our own records out, did zines, booked tours,” says Bickel. “It’s basically a way of figuring out how to communicate an idea out into the world without having a lot of money behind it.”
“If I hadn’t been through all that, from bands and stuff, I don’t think I would have approached doing movies the same way,” he continues. “I probably wouldn’t do movies at all, but if I did, it probably would have been a more traditional route of moving to L.A. and being a gofer on set and working my way up through the ranks and I think this way is more fun. Sometimes you wish you had more money, but I think I enjoy doing things on this level.”
Pater Noster and the Mission of Light is out digitally and as a double-disc Blu Ray. Both the movie and the double-vinyl soundtrack album are available for purchase via the film’s Indie Go Go page.
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Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram or Bluesky for more updates.
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