God Told Me To (1976 film)
Creating God Told Me To (1976), AKA Demon,
Summary
"Conceived in a hell beyond our galaxy! Destined to rule our world! The people of this city are being terrorized. The crimes have no motives. The killers have only one explanation: God Told Me To!" A New York detective investigates a series of murders committed by random New Yorkers who claim that "God told them to".
Details
- Release Date: 1976
- Country/Language: US, English
- Genres/Technical: Crime (police procedural), Mystery, Sci-fi, Horror (psychological horror)
- Setting: 1970s New York
- Runtime: 1 hr 31 min
- Starring: Tony Lo Bianco, Deborah Raffin, Sandy Dennis
- Director: Larry Cohen
- Writer: Larry Cohen
- Producer/Production Co: Larry Cohen, Big Hit Productions, New World Pictures
- View Trailer: (link)
- Wikipedia: (link)
- IMDB: (link)
Ratings
MPAA Ratings
- Rated: R (Violence, brief Nudity, mild Profanity and Adult Content)
Tentacle Ratings
A rough measure of how "Lovecraftian" the work is:
- SS___ (Two Tentacles: Barely Lovecraftian; vaguely similar in tone, could be a very loose adaptation)
A police detective discovers that the reason for the rise is bizarre, violent crime is a strange alien messiah who leads a doomsday cult programmed to execute his every command. There's the tiniest bit of "The Dunwich Horror (fiction)" involved here, and the end result otherwise is a sort of "The Omen - FROM SPACE!", meets a darker-and-edgier Kolchak: the Night Stalker (1975 series).....
Note: This rating is not intended as a measure of quality, merely of how closely related to Lovecraftian "Weird" fiction the work is.
Reviews
Review Links:
- Richart Scheib at The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review (3.5/5 Stars) (link) - "The concepts present are in the end perhaps more than Larry Cohen can realistically bite off but one can only applaud him for the wildness of the ideas he tackles."
Synopsis (SPOILERS)
Spoiler Section (Highlight to Read)
A police detective is psychologically traumatized after he discovers that the reason for the rise is bizarre, violent crime is a strange alien messiah, conceived from an alien abduction, who now leads a doomsday cult programmed to execute his every command. Strangely, the suspect leaves a trail of corpses behind him, but does not kill the detective, who discovers over the course of his investigation that he, too, was the child of a UFO abductee, with the alien cult leader revealing that the detective shares his psychic powers, only they are still latent and undeveloped, something the alien cult leader offers to help with, in addition to breeding hermaphroditically with the detective to breed a race of alien halflings. Horrified, the detective refuses, and tries to kill the alien cult leader, who causes the building to explode, destroying the body. When the detective is arrested for the suspect's murder and asked why he did it, he replies "God told me to!", and is institutionalized....
Notes
Comments, Trivia, Dedication
Associated Mythos Elements
- (TO_DO)
Keeper Notes
- The investigators are swept up into an investigation of a wave of seemingly unrelated spree murders and other violent crimes, connected only by the otherwise normal suspects' assertion that "god told them to" commit the crimes; the clues all begin to point to the strange, indescribable, anonymous child of a UFO abductee, who had grow up into the inhuman leader of a bizarre doomsday cult.
