Paul Bickel’s Our Happy Place — Quarantine Horror Turns Isolation into Terror

Paul Bickel’s Our Happy Place transforms pandemic isolation into psychological terror — now streaming on Amazon.

A haunting descent into isolation and madness, Paul Bickel’s Our Happy Place is now available to stream on Amazon — a deeply personal psychological horror born from quarantine, shot in the mountains of Big Bear Lake, and brought to life by an intimate cast and crew.

The film follows Raya (Raya Miles), whose life unravels as she tends to her bedridden husband in a remote cabin. Each night, she’s plagued by nightmares of tortured women, and every morning she wakes up buried in a shallow grave in the woods, with no memory of how she got there. As the boundaries between dreams and waking life collapse, Raya begins to piece together a terrifying truth — one that links her to the women haunting her and the forest that refuses to let her go.

What began as a pandemic passion project soon evolved into a fully realized thriller. During lockdown, Bickel and Miles relocated from their Los Angeles apartment to Big Bear Lake, where they used their “grandma-style” mountain home and the surrounding wilderness as the backdrop for their horror experiment. With filming gear left over from a previous project, Bickel wrote, directed, and starred in the film, while Miles handled makeup, camera work, and effects.

Joining the pair via FaceTime were Tracie Thoms (Death Proof, Cold Case) and Eugene Byrd (Bones, 8 Mile), adding layers of tension and psychological texture from afar. Once production resumed under eased restrictions, Bickel completed shooting in both the mountains and Los Angeles, working closely with editor Jim Holdridge and producer David Ho to shape the final cut. The result is an eerie, dreamlike experience underscored by David Hernandez’s haunting score.

Our Happy Place thrives on its handmade intensity — the product of two creatives determined to keep storytelling alive through the uncertainty of the pandemic. Its claustrophobic dread, emotional intimacy, and supernatural undertones recall the best of indie psychological horror.

Now streaming on Amazon, Our Happy Place stands as proof that powerful horror can emerge from the quietest corners — even when the world stands still.

Directed by: Paul Bickel

Written by: Paul Bickel

Starring: Raya Miles, Paul Bickel, Tracie Thoms, Eugene Byrd