Brian De Palma’s 1984 thriller Body Double was seen by many at the time as a deliberate provocation — a vigorously thumbed nose at the commentators who’d called his work misogynistic and sadistic as well as at the MPAA, which had given his 1983 film Scarface an X. De Palma himself reportedly said that Body Double was meant to go over the top in all of his alleged cinematic sins. The 84-year-old director now admits that was mostly publicity-friendly bluster. But the movie, which is coming out in a special 4K edition to honor its 40th anniversary, is extreme in all sorts of ways: It’s gory, violent, sexy, stylized, ridiculous, an extremely suspenseful picture that is somehow impossible to take too seriously. It also happens to be a masterpiece, which would come as a surprise to the critics and audiences that rejected it back during its release: The film flopped at the box office, De Palma was nominated for a Worst Director Razzie, and even Pauline Kael, a longtime defender of his, called it “an awful disappointment.” Looking back on it now, De Palma says, “You’re always judged by the style of the day, but sometimes the style of the day is not the right way to appraise something innovative.”

In truth, Body Double is the kind of movie that could only work with the unique mix of formal charge and playful self-awareness that De Palma brought to it. It’s a thoroughly transfixing thriller, filled with elaborately choreographed set pieces in service of an absurd story. A characteristic riff on Hitchcock classics such as Vertigo and Rear Window, it follows a claustrophobic out-of-work actor (Craig Wasson) who breaks up with his adulterous girlfriend and winds up house-sitting a fancy, space-age pad in the Hollywood Hills. There, he becomes obsessed with a mysterious woman across the street who loves to dance erotically at an appointed hour. The insanely gruesome series of events that follows pulls our hero deep into the 1980s porn industry (or at least a cartoonish version of it), where he then becomes infatuated with Holly Body (Melanie Griffith, in what might be her greatest role), a performer who may or may not have a connection to that woman in the window. He also, at one point, winds up in the middle of a real-life music video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax,” a wonderfully bizarre sequence that is left mostly unexplained but feels very much of a piece with De Palma’s earlier, more experimental films. “Somebody at Columbia said, ‘We should have a music video for this movie,’ De Palma recalls. “And I said, ‘Why don’t we put the music video in the movie?’”

Body Double has a pointedly colorful and artificial look that seems to highlight its “movieness,” which also happens to be what the film is about. The protagonist falls in love with a woman whom he only sees through a telescope as she dances, her face hidden, behind a window. His claustrophobia and general awkwardness often prevent him from being able to get close to this person, which effectively turns him into a stalker. He is, in effect, a perfect audience surrogate — a voyeur who increasingly has trouble telling the difference between the movies and reality, a tantalizing boundary that De Palma’s film zigzags across many times.

Body Double is beloved today. But it’s also the kind of movie that nobody could make today. Speaking from his New York City home, De Palma, whose most recent picture was 2019’s little-seen Domino, has some thoughts on that as well as the current state of cinema. He also says that he is working on a new film.