Halloween Horror: God Told Me To

I saw this at a midnight screening a couple years ago. While the ending premise of the film is pretty wild, I think it shows how our culture relates religious fervor to mental instability, but then gives us yet another explanation. Many times it's hard to distinguish between the two. I don't claim to be any kind of expert in either topic, but my knee jerk summation is "crazy" when I hear someone claiming to talk to any god or see some religious icon on a toasted on a tortilla.

In God Told Me To, Tony LoBianco is a New York cop, Pete, who is trying to get to the bottom of random murders where the criminals all say "God told me to" do it. None of the criminals seem to have any connection to their victims, so Pete, a devout Catholic, really begins to believe that God HAS told these people, for some reason, to carry out the killings.


In his digging for the truth, he finds out about a "virgin birth" years ago:  a genderless child was born that grew up into a Christlike figure who somehow through a kind of telepathy, coerced some of the killers. Pete digs into his own past, he is an orphan given up by a woman (Sylvia Sidney) who claimed to have been abducted by aliens and molested. In his present life, he can't seem to leave his wife (Sandy Dennis) in order to commit to his girlfriend (Deborah Raffin).

The religion aspect of the characters definitely is heavy handed at the start. When they connect it to the aliens plot later on, it does feel schlocky. The film is made by Larry Cohen, a guy known for slapping together schlocky horror films. The more serious scenes, especially the one where Pete confronts his birth mother, does give the theme more credibility. But the questions it raises about how all powerful aliens that can be seen as gods, and humans creating the culture of religion to explain it, is an interesting one and I wished the film developed this theme more seriously. It does attempt to explain in a thoughtful way Pete's past and how he and others could be seen as godlike figures.