God Told Me To: Larry Cohen's Theological Sci-Fi Horror

A man is on a water tower above Manhattan with a rifle, shooting people on the street below. A detective climbs up to talk him down, gets close enough for a conversation, and asks the only question there is. The sniper answers: God told me to. Then he steps off.

That is the first five minutes of Larry Cohen’s 1976 film, and the extraordinary thing is that the film means it. The title is the confession, offered up front, and the next ninety minutes are spent taking the sentence literally — following it out of the police procedural, through the New York streets, and into a theology so strange that no American studio picture has gone near it since. God Told Me To is the most ambitious film Cohen made, the least disciplined, and the one that has aged into something close to essential.

The procedural that keeps going

Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) is an NYPD detective and a serious Catholic, which the film establishes as a load-bearing fact rather than colour. He is separated from his wife Martha (Sandy Dennis) and living with his girlfriend Casey (Deborah Raffin), and he will not divorce, because the Church says he cannot — so he sustains a state of permanent, low-grade mortal sin as a matter of routine. Every scene of his private life is a man managing an unresolvable account with God.

Then ordinary New Yorkers start committing massacres. A man kills his family. A supermarket shopper opens fire. A police officer steps out of the St Patrick’s Day parade and starts shooting into the crowd — and that officer is played by Andy Kaufman, in his first film appearance, a piece of casting so strange it barely registers as intentional.

Each killer, asked why, gives the same answer. Nicholas works the case as a case: witnesses, records, a pattern, a name. The pattern holds. That is the film’s first great structural joke — the procedural methodology works, the clues connect, the detective is good at his job, and the trail leads somewhere the procedural has no vocabulary for at all. The genre delivers him, competently and on schedule, to the foot of something enormous.

Cohen shot it in the actual city

Cohen’s production method is inseparable from the film’s texture. He worked without the permits a studio would have considered mandatory, put his camera on real New York pavements, and shot into real crowds who did not know a film was being made. The parade sequence is the notorious one: the St Patrick’s Day parade in the frame is the St Patrick’s Day parade, marching down a real Fifth Avenue, and Cohen inserted his actor and his camera into it and stole the scene.

The result is a documentary substrate that money cannot buy. When a shooting breaks out in this film, the people scattering include people genuinely scattering, and the faces at the edge of frame are faces reacting to something they do not understand. The city looks used. The interiors are cramped and brown. There is a grubby, unmediated 1976 New York in this film of the kind that survives now mostly in still photographs.

That guerrilla texture is doing serious thematic work. A film about ordinary citizens turning on each other in the street needs the street to be real, and the moment the mayhem is staged on a backlot with extras the whole premise turns to cardboard. Cohen understood that the horror was civic, so he filmed the actual civitas.

The real ancestor is a Hammer film

Every genre film has a parent it does not advertise, and God Told Me To has one of the least likely in horror. The film it is descended from is Quatermass and the Pit, Roy Ward Baker’s 1967 Hammer adaptation of Nigel Kneale, and the debt is architectural.

Kneale’s move, and it is one of the great moves in genre writing, is to take the entire apparatus of religion and reveal it as a misremembered encounter with something extraterrestrial. The devil has horns because something with horns really came. The mob’s collective madness in the London streets is a species memory being switched back on. The investigation proceeds by rational method throughout, and the rational method arrives at the horned figure — validating the theology by explaining it away, which is far more disturbing than either alternative.

Cohen takes that manoeuvre to New York and points it at Christianity itself. Where Kneale reverse-engineers the devil, Cohen reverse-engineers the incarnation: a light in the sky, a woman who conceives without a man, a golden-haired son who claims divinity and can make people obey. The film is asking, with a completely straight face, what the Annunciation would look like if it were an abduction, and what a messiah would look like if the mechanism behind him were indifferent. Nicholas’s Catholicism stops being characterisation at that point and becomes the film’s instrument — he is the only man in New York equipped to recognise what he is looking at, and the last man who wants to.

Rosemary Woodhouse spent Rosemary’s Baby discovering that her pregnancy had been arranged. Cohen’s detective discovers that his was.

Why it works, and where it doesn’t

God Told Me To is a genuinely flawed film and the flaws are inseparable from what makes it valuable. The plotting in the final third lurches. Sandy Dennis’s scenes belong to a different, quieter picture. The special effects are what a modest 1976 budget could manage, which is to say a lot of light and a lot of smoke, and there is a sequence near the end that reaches so far past its means that the reach is all you see.

It works anyway, for two reasons. The first is Lo Bianco, who plays Nicholas as a man being slowly disassembled by information — no hysteria, no breakdown, just a decent cop absorbing successive facts that each cost him something permanent. The second is that Cohen refuses every available exit. There is no debunking. No point where the film reveals the cult as fraud or the messiah as a con. It commits to its premise all the way down, and it pays the premise off in a confession that reframes the title as the film’s last line as well as its first.

That commitment is the Cohen signature, and it runs through the whole body of work: take an idea nobody would greenlight, refuse to blink, shoot it in the street for no money. He did it with the pharmaceutical anxiety of It’s Alive, with the consumer satire of The Stuff, and most gleefully with the Aztec god nesting on top of the Chrysler Building in Q: The Winged Serpent.

Where to watch: it circulates under the alternate title Demon, which is how many television and video prints have it, and the Blue Underground restoration is the one to find — the street photography is the film’s chief asset and it needs the grain intact. The verdict is that this is the most audacious American horror film of 1976 and one of the very few that genuinely cannot be summarised to anyone who has not seen it. For where its religious anxieties sit in the wider tradition, the possession film and the return of the religious has the lineage.

Spoilers below

The trail leads to Bernard Phillips (Richard Lynch), a golden-haired young man kept in a darkened room by devoted followers, radiating light, who has been issuing the instruction that the killers obeyed. He does not deny it. He invites Nicholas in.

The revelations arrive in layers and each one is worse than the last. Phillips was born to a woman who, decades earlier, was taken up into a light in the sky and returned pregnant, having known no man. She was not the only one. Elizabeth Mullin (Sylvia Sidney), an elderly woman Nicholas tracks down, gives him the second half of it in a scene played with total, devastating calm: the same light, the same taking, the same impossible child — and that child was given away for adoption and grew up to be Detective Peter Nicholas.

So the film’s Catholic cop, the man whose entire moral life is organised around a doctrine of virgin birth and divine sonship, is himself a virgin birth. He is Phillips’s half-brother. The theology he has been failing to live up to since childhood turns out to be a biological description of him.

Cohen then delivers the image the film has been building to and that no distributor could have wanted: Phillips, stripped, revealed as neither male nor female, his body carrying a glowing vulval seam in his side — a self-sufficient thing designed to reproduce alone. His offer to Nicholas is fraternal and reproductive at once, an invitation to join him and complete whatever the light started. The messiah wants a mate and a brother, and he has only one candidate.

Nicholas kills him. The building burns. And then the film closes the circle with its last exchange: taken in, asked by a fellow officer why he did it, the detective who spent ninety minutes hearing that answer from other people’s mouths says it himself. God told me to. The title was never the question the film was investigating. It was the verdict it was waiting to reach.