Body Double
1984 · 114 min
Directed by Brian De Palma. Written by Brian De Palma. Starring Craig Wasson, Melanie Griffith, Gregg Henry, Deborah Shelton.
After losing an acting role and his girlfriend, Jake Scully finally catches a break: he gets offered a gig house-sitting in the Hollywood Hills. While peering through the beautiful home's telescope one night, he spies a gorgeous woman dancing in her window. But when he witnesses the girl's murder, it leads Scully through the netherworld of the adult entertainment industry on a search for answers—with porn actress Holly Body as his guide.
Critics 79% · audiences 65% · streaming on Roku Channel, Tubi · $8.8 million in the US and Canada on its first run · $74 elsewhere · about 2.6 million tickets sold, 1.1% of the country
What they said about Body Double
- 1984
again goes too far, which is the reason to see it. It's sexy and explicitly crude, entertaining and sometimes very funny.
— Vincent Canby, The New York Times - 1984
To his credit, DePalma moves his camera as beautifully as any director in the business today and on a purely physical level Body Double often proves quite seductive as the camera tracks, swirls, cranes and zooms towards and around the objects of De Palma's usually sinister contemplation. Unfortunately, most of the film consists of visual riffs on Alfred Hitchcock, particularly Vertigo and Rear Window.
— Todd McCarthy, Variety - 1984
gliding, sensual trancelike style that is the most sheerly pleasurable achievement in contemporary movies.
— David Denby, New York - 1984
A lewd, gory, twisty-turny murder mystery swirling around Hollywood's porn industry, Body Double finds Brian De Palma at the zenith of his cinematic virtuosity.
— Paul Attanasio, The Washington Post - 1984
finally may have exhausted the patience of even his most tenacious admirers.
— Sheila Benson, Los Angeles Times - 1984
When the drill came onto the screen, De Palma lost me and control of his movie. At that point Body Double ceased to be a homage to Hitchcock and instead became a cheap splatter film, and not a very good one at that.
— Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune
How it got made
After Brian De Palma's successes of Carrie, Dressed to Kill and his remake of Scarface, Columbia Pictures offered him a three-picture deal with Body Double set to be the first. De Palma created the concept of the film after interviewing Angie Dickinson's body doubles for Dressed to Kill. "I started thinking about the whole idea of the body double," he said. "I wondered what I would do if I wanted to make sure to get somebody's attention, to have them looking at a certain place at a certain time." The erotic thriller was also becoming a popular genre to audiences, with the box offices successes of Dressed to Kill and Body Heat. After fighting with censorship boards over the rating of Scarface — they rated it X and he had to battle to make it R – De Palma resolved to make Body Double as pushback. At the time, he said, "If this one doesn't get an X, nothing I ever do is going to. This is going to be the most erotic and surprising and thrilling movie I know how to make...I'm going to give them everything they hate and more of it than they've ever seen. They think Scarface was violent? They think my other movies were erotic? Wait until they see Body Double."
Having been impressed with the horror film Blood Bride, De Palma enlisted its director and writer Robert J. Avrech to write the Body Double script with him. Both were fans of Alfred Hitchcock, and screened Rear Window and Vertigo to gather inspiration. Avrech later described his work on the film as "working off of De Palma's ideas of Hitchcock's ideas."
De Palma initially wanted pornographic actress Annette Haven to play Holly, but she was rejected by the studio due to her pornographic filmography. Nonetheless, Haven did appear in a minor role and consulted with De Palma about the adult film industry. De Palma then offered the role to Linda Hamilton, who turned it down in favor of The Terminator. Jamie Lee Curtis, Carrie Fisher and Tatum O'Neal were considered for the role before Melanie Griffith was cast. De Palma later said Haven "was an enormous amount of help" to him in his understanding of the adult film industry and what Holly's background might be, and Griffith brought "a comic edge that I wanted to be a major part of the tone of the second half of the movie." Griffith was initially reluctant to take the role, thinking she "didn't want any more nymphet roles, but now I think I can bring a lot of life to that kind of character...I think I gave her a great amount of intelligence."
At the box office
Body Double was released theatrically in the United States on October 26, 1984, the same day as The Terminator. It opened at number three at the box office, earning $2.8 million in its opening weekend. The film earned $8.2 million over its first three weeks, before being pulled in its fourth week. The film earned $8.8 million on a $10 million budget, making it a box office bomb.
Afterwards
The 1989 black comedy film Vampire's Kiss takes its title from the B-movie Jake Scully acts in. The 1991 Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho repeatedly refers to Body Double as the favorite film of serial killer Patrick Bateman because of the power drill scene. Bateman mentions that he has seen the film 37 times and rents the tape of it from a video store several times in the story.
Pop singer Slayyyter cited Body Double as an influence on her 2023 album Starfucker. The cover for her single "Erotic Electronic" is a visual reference to the film's poster. The 2024 Ti West horror film MaXXXine contains several visual and thematic references to Body Double.