God Told Me To

• The St. Patrick's Day parade shooting was filmed guerrilla-style at the actual parade with no permit. Andy Kaufman, making his feature film debut as the cop-turned-shooter, was snuck right into the real procession in his police uniform — Larry Cohen shot the scene live in the crowd and somehow never got caught.
• Robert Forster was the original lead and lasted only a few days. Accounts vary on the trigger (Forster called Cohen a yeller and said 'this isn't for me, let me out of here'; Cohen's commentary blames Forster chewing gum on camera), but the clash was real, and Cohen replaced him with Tony Lo Bianco, who'd appeared in his play 'The Nature of the Crime.'
• Bernard Herrmann — who'd scored Cohen's 'It's Alive' — was lined up to score this too. Cohen said Herrmann watched a cut and took notes right after wrapping his sessions for 'Taxi Driver,' then died within roughly a day. The film carries a dedication to Herrmann, as does 'Taxi Driver.'
• Cohen next offered the score to Miklós Rózsa, who turned it down with the line 'God told me not to.' Frank Cordell ended up writing the Herrmann-flavored score used in the release print.
• Distributor New World Pictures retitled the film 'Demon' to ride the post-'Exorcist'/'Omen' occult wave, even issuing posters made to look like 'The Omen' — a choice Cohen found baffling, since his own preferred alternate title had been 'The Alien.' Under neither name did it perform; the film built its reputation later as a cult item.
• Richard Lynch played the messianic Bernard Phillips, and the cast is stacked with veterans: Sandy Dennis, Sylvia Sidney, and Deborah Raffin all turn up in a sci-fi-horror oddity nobody could quite categorize on release.

The whole film is a Catholic guilt-trip wearing a sci-fi mask. Nicholas is a believer cheating on his wife who can't stop confessing, and the 'virgin birth' reveal doesn't expand his faith so much as detonate it — every killer is just doing what a heavenly voice commanded, which is exactly the obedience the Church asks for. The horror isn't the alien; it's the realization that faith and a kill order can sound identical.

Bernard isn't a villain so much as a mirror. He wants Nicholas to breed a new species with him, framing the climax as two messiahs deciding whether to restart creation. Read that way, Nicholas killing him is less a hero stopping a monster than God's son refusing to become God — and his final 'God told me to' makes him just one more name in the same case file he's been working.

The murders read as a city's nervous breakdown made literal. Cohen shoots a grimy, paranoid mid-70s New York where strangers snap for no reason, and the supernatural cause is almost an excuse — the real subject is ordinary people one whisper away from violence, with the divine command standing in for whatever pressure already had them loaded.

A sniper picks off New Yorkers from a water tower, a father guns down his family, a cop opens fire at the St. Patrick's Day parade — and every killer answers the same way before they die: God told me to. Detective Peter Nicholas, a married Catholic carrying on an affair and a head full of guilt, follows the bodies back to Bernard Phillips, a glowing recluse born of a "virgin birth." What Nicholas uncovers about Bernard's origin, and his own, drags the case out of the precinct and into something closer to scripture rewritten by aliens.