originally credited as executive producers but Cohen says when they saw the finished film they insisted their names be taken off it. Robert Forster was originally cast in the lead role. A few days into filming he and Cohen had a falling out and Forster quit. Forster said Cohen "was one of those guys who yelled a lot on the set, and I said, "Hey, this isn't for me. Let me out of here." We parted friendly and all that." Cohen replaced him with Tony Lo Bianco, who had been in Cohen's play The Nature of the Crime. Bernard Herrmann, who had scored Cohen's earlier film It's Alive, was originally assigned to score God Told Me To as well, and Cohen claims on the DVD commentary track that Herrmann saw the first cut of the film immediately after completing the recording sessions for his score to Taxi Driver and made notes on how he believed it could be scored. However, within the next 15 hours, Herrmann died. Cohen then asked composer Miklós Rózsa to score the film. Rózsa turned it down, saying "God told me not to". Frank Cordell composed the score heard in the released version of God Told Me To, and both it and Taxi Driver were dedicated to Herrmann. Composer Robert O. Ragland who later scored Cohen's 1982 film Q wrote two of the songs for the film. The 'alien abduction' sequence, where a naked woman is drawn up into the cavernous interior of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, features (manipulated) generic stock model footage from Gerry Anderson's science fiction TV series Space: 1999. Andy Kaufman appears as a possessed policeman who goes on a shooting rampage at the Saint Patrick's Day parade — it was Kaufman's first role in any film, and the same footage was later used for the finale of a documentary called The Passion of Andy Kaufman, in a segment called "Thus Spake Zarathustra", with music by Eumir Deodato. Sylvia Sidney appears as Detective Nicholas's long-lost, traumatized mother in a nursing home. Release The film was sold to New World Pictures. It did not perform well on original release so it was re-issued under the title of Demon. Reception Initial reviews were negative, with Roger Ebert giving the film 1 out of 4. The film has since been reappraised, with Rolling Stone naming it one of the "20 Scariest Films You've Never Seen". In the