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AKA Demon; God Told Me To Kill

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.” – Proverbs 3:5-6

DIRECTED BY: Larry Cohen

FEATURING: Tony Lo Bianco, Deborah Raffin, Sandy Dennis, Sylvia Sidney, Sam Levene, Mike Kellin, Richard Lynch

PLOT: NYPD detective Peter Nicholas investigates a series of spree killings in which the perpetrators all seem to act with no provocation or explanation, each justifying their actions by saying “God told me to.” Nicholas, a devout Catholic, is infuriated by this claim, but equally plagued by their certainty and his shame over his own sins and infidelities. His investigation leads him to an unearthly suspect, an individual with stories of alien abduction, virgin birth, and Nicholas’ own family history.

BACKGROUND:

• Cohen was a genre chameleon whose c.v. includes the blaxploitation gangster flick Black Caesar, the giant-beast-in-New-York movie Q: The Winged Serpent, and the consumerism horror-satire The Stuff, and his previous film It’s Alive, the tale of a monstrous baby that our own Alfred Eaker called “one of the best horror films of the decade.”
• Cohen planned to engage Bernard Herrmann, who provided the music for It’s Alive, to compose the score for the new film. According to Cohen, Herrmann watched a rough cut and afterwards discussed his plans with the director over dinner. Unfortunately, Herrmann passed away in his sleep that night. (The film is dedicated to the composer.) Cohen’s next choice, Miklós Rózsa, turned down the job, saying, “God told me not to.” Frank Cordell eventually scored the film.
• Cohen first cast Robert Forster in the role of the detective. Forster worked on the film for several days before tiring of the director’s methods and leaving the production.
• The policeman who goes on a shooting rampage at the St. Patrick’s Day parade is portrayed by Andy Kaufman, in his film debut. Cohen crashed the actual parade to film without a permit, and said later that he had to intervene with onlookers to protect Kaufman when the comedian taunted them.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: In their final showdown, the glowing, androgynous Bernard tempts Nicholas to join forces and spawn a new race of beings on earth. As proof of his bonafides, Philip pulls up his tunic to reveal a pulsing vagina located squarely in the left side of his chest. It’s a startling sight (and a curious location at that), but it clears the bar for shock value, and ensures that Nicholas is definitively unconvinced to join the cause.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Abstract alien abduction; ribcage vagina

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: God Told Me To builds upon the intriguing decision to take the rantings of homicidal lunatics seriously, and to consider the possibility that God really is commanding the insane to do their horrible deeds. Upon this simple subversion, Cohen piles up a child’s treasury of conspiracy theories and paranoid tropes, including shadowy cabals of power, police corruption, ancient astronauts, hermaphroditism, mind control, and angel/devil dichotomies. It’s a mad melange of wild ideas and outlandish plot twists that guarantees you never quite get your footing.

Original trailer for God Told Me To (1976)

COMMENTS: “It’s based on a true story!” Larry Cohen told the Village Voice about God Told Me To in 2018. “No, seriously, it’s a picture about religion, and the violence people do in the name of religion — which feels really relevant today.” Of course, Cohen was far from the first person to note that God (especially the Old Testament flavor) was a notably violent, vengeful deity. Where Cohen carves out a special niche is pointing the finger directly at the big G, not merely blaming the Almighty for inspiring evil deeds but accusing him of being the actual villain. It sets up a fascinating manhunt for a righteous policeman who may be chasing the very being who gave him his sense of morality and justice.

For a while, that seems to be Cohen’s agenda, as he lays out the case against God: a sniper whose bullets couldn’t possibly hit their targets without divine intervention. A happy beat cop who murderously turns on his colleagues without a hint of provocation. A father who (in a powerfully unsettling scene) describes how he murdered his family with an almost beatific sense of tranquility. Here at the quarter-mark of the 21^st century, we are almost inured to the horror of similar events, but in the moment Cohen makes a case that no human being could perpetrate acts of such evil without the guiding hand of divine direction. Indeed, the detective starts lining up clues that point to the man upstairs. There’s a mysterious character whose glow makes it impossible to behold his face. There’s evidence of parthenogenesis. And a nervous group of powerful wheeler-dealers are out to shut the investigation down. How Peter Nicholas is going to take down his quarry is a genuine puzzle.

It’s at this point that, in this correspondent’s view, Cohen loses his nerve, but in an oddly fascinating manner. The filmmaker is renowned for his eagerness to mix genres, but what happens here feels more like replacement, a shift necessitated because the police procedural could no longer carry the weight of the otherworldly topics it was being asked to bear. First we’re misdirected to think that the God who is abetting mass murder is actually the devil, given his predilection for hanging out in unusually warm spaces underground. Then the virgin birth is revealed to be the product of an alien abduction, and the resulting entity identifies itself as akin to past prophets like Jesus or Mohamed. Ultimately, Nicholas concludes that he is directly connected to the case, and unearths evidence that he himself is the product of an extraterrestrial-powered conception and blessed with similar powers. Meanwhile, all of this supernatural hubbub is taking place in the gritty 70s-era New York City of Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet. It’s both highly amusing and strangely anticlimactic for Nicholas to try out his own godly powers in a Harlem pool hall straight out of a Quinn Martin cop show, as though the wayward detective himself was still refusing to give in to anything too outrageous. When the time comes to throw the book at God, Cohen pulls his punch, content to let two God-analogues duke it out on a lesser stage.

As messy as God Told Me To gets, it’s always interesting. Cohen’s gift for dialogue sometimes makes the film feel like a clever adaptation of a smart stage play, where characters fight over big ideas. Lo Bianco is graceful as a decent man in a world that seems to have no room for such a trait, and his dialogues with assassins, skeptical reporters, and frightened old women would feel at home on Broadway stage. Cohen also affords Raffin and Dennis unexpected dignity in the face of the neglect and deception that Lo Bianco serves them. Even if you excised all the scenes of action and violence, you’d still have a pretty powerful drama.

God Told Me To is a heady mix of righteous anger, subverted expectations, and Big Apple bluster. Even if the Lord in Heaven never quite gets the comeuppance that seems to be his due, Cohen summons up enough sacrilege and guilt-by-association to sully His good name. When Peter Nicholas finally utters the title phrase himself, it’s no longer an excuse; it’s an indictment.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the most confused feature-length film I’ve ever seen. There were times when I thought the projectionist was showing the reels in random order, as a quiet joke on the hapless audience.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“Tellingly, God Told Me To breaks decisively from its procedural narrative halfway through its running time, operating on a free-associative logic that grows progressively more unmooring… represents the most purely muscular visual filmmaking of Cohen’s career, as he wields a shaky docudramatic camera to achieve elegantly unhinged images that ground the insane plot in the quotidian details of New York City, particularly the heatwaves that palpably emanate from the vividly rendered neon colors of the street vistas.” – Chuck Bowen and Budd Wilkins, Slant Magazine (Blu-ray)

IMDB LINK: God Told Me To (1976)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Rolling Stone – Revisiting Hours: ‘God Told Me To,’ From Mass Murder to Divine Madness – Noel Murray makes the case that Cohen’s film has particular resonance 50 years on as comment on a society “where the basics of right and wrong become a matter of opinion”

God Told Me To (film) – TV Tropes God Told Me To page lists various recurring motifs used in the film

Obsessive Movie Nerd – The Cohen Case Files: God Told Me To [aka Demon] (1976) – The inaugural entry in Matt Wedge’s comprehensive survey of Cohen’s career

LIST CANDIDATE: GOD TOLD ME TO (1976) – Pamela De Graff’s original List Candidate review

HOME VIDEO INFO: God Told Me To has gone through many home video incarnations dating back to the VHS era, but its been Blue Underground that’s kept the title alive, and they now have the ultimate eidition. Their 2022 4K release (buy) includes a 4K UHD disc and a standard Blu-ray. Both discs include 2 commentaries, one by Cohen himself (recycled from the 2015 DVD release) and a new one from commentators Troy Howarth and Steve Mitchell. Both discs also include multiple trailers and TV spots, while the Blu-ray houses exclusive interviews with star Lo Bianco and special effects supervisor Steve Neill, plus 2 separate Q&A sessions with Cohen, and a poster/still gallery.

At the time of this writing God Told Me To was available for free to Prime Video subscribers, and is also as rentable through various Video-on-Demand providers.

Where to watch God Told Me To