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I rewatched Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984) recently. Again. And once more I’m reminded why this film remains one of the most underrated entries in his impressive catalog. If you haven’t seen it I highly recommend you check it out. It’s also eminently re-watchable, and you can most certainly discover something new with each viewing.

Released in 1984 to nearly universal critical scorn, Body Double was dismissed as gratuitously lurid, derivative Hitchcock worship. Critics at the time couldn’t see past the ample nudity and genre pastiche. Even Pauline Kael, typically a De Palma champion, called it “stupid yet moderately entertaining.” It bombed at the box office, earning just $8.8 million against a $10 million budget.

They were all wrong.

The De Palma Deep Cuts Hold Up

When casual moviegoers think of Brian De Palma, they reach for the obvious: Al Pacino’s cocaine mountain in Scarface (1983) or Kevin Costner stalking Robert De Niro through Prohibition-era Chicago in The Untouchables (1987). These are fine films, well-crafted crowd-pleasers that showcase De Palma’s technical prowess. Certainly nothing wrong with those, and I’m guessing they helped pay the bills.

But his lesser-known works are arguably where he’s at his best. Sisters (1972), Obsession (1976), and yes, Body Double form a more personal trilogy of Hitchcockian fever dreams where De Palma operates without the constraints of studio expectations or star vehicles. These are the films where he takes real risks. Where the voyeurism becomes uncomfortably explicit. Where style and substance merge into something genuinely unsettling.

Body Double might be the apex of this approach.

Meta Before Meta? (Yes!)

What those critics missed is that Body Double isn’t just another Hitchcock homage. It’s De Palma making a film about making films. It’s a director holding a mirror up to his own obsessions, his critics, and the entire Hollywood machine. This might be his take on Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963), albeit told in a completely different style. Yet, equally entertaining in my opinion.

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A salacious take on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (with further inspiration from Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Dial M for Murder), Brian De Palma’s Body Double performed poorly at the box office and was controversial among critics. However, its reputation has grown more favorable over the years, generating a bona fide cult following. With its maximalist aesthetics and subversive meta-commentary, some now consider Body Double one of the best films of the 1980s."

Elsewhere in De Palma on De Palma, De Palma brings up Billy Wilder while discussing Carlito's Way:

Al [Pacino] and his friend, producer Martin Bregman, had been looking to do Carlito's Way for years. They worked with Edwin Torres, the author of the two books on which the film is based, and kept telling me that it was very different from Scarface. When I read the script I could see that it was indeed very different. The tone was more fatalistic, the story took place in the Seventies, and there was this agonising voiceover that reminded me of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard or Double Indemnity. I was immediately hooked.

For filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, whose new documentary Videoheaven (2025) considers the lifespan of video stores through their depiction in films and TV shows, trying to understand what happened to the video store was not simply an academic concern. Born in 1984, just a few months before Brian de Palma’s Body Double depicted a video store in a film for the first time, Perry spent his whole early adult life working in video stores. “My first job was at Suncoast video,” he told me in an interview on Zoom. “The whole time I was in college at NYU and then for a year and a half after, I worked at Kim’s Video on St. Mark’s between 2nd and 3rd Avenue.”

Kim’s, which opened in 1987 and stayed open until 2008, was an extraordinary place, known for the size of its collection and the knowledge of its staff (a number of whom, like Perry, went on to become filmmakers). “Go to any film school, and you can draw a line around the thousand most canonical films,” Perry explains. “That’s what you’re getting. And that’s a lot. Kim’s had fifty thousand movies. And the idea that you came to one physical room to access these things was very special. It’s how I grew up.”

Over the years Perry, who has written and/or directed more than a dozen films, has pitched any number of stories involving video stores without success. Then he read Daniel Herbert’s 2014 book Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store. In subsequent conversation with Herbert, he came up with the idea to document the depiction of video stores in film and TV shows, from their earliest portrayal in the eighties through to their collapse in the 2000s.

The more Perry dug into the project, the more he discovered a possible solution to this mystery he had been struggling with for so long. He acknowledges most believed there was no real mystery to solve: just as streaming is now cannibalizing cinema, it previously devoured the video rental business. But he was not fully convinced. “Yes, streaming started roughly the time stores went away, but so does music streaming—even earlier actually, and you can’t go to a small-town Main Street and not still find a credible music store.”

“Streaming didn’t end music sales—though it brought it very low. E-books didn’t end book stores.” So again, why was it different for video?

What he discovered in his research is that as the years went on, films and TV shows took a more and more hostile view of video stores. After initially portraying them as places where people are exposed to danger—David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome, though it doesn’t show a store, treats the video tape itself as a sort of monster we let into our houses—for a time video stores were imagined as spaces of discovery, even adventure. These were places where visitors had the chance to have richly curated cultural experiences, and also perhaps to experience for themselves the kinds of stories they watched. Clerks found themselves thrown into action movies. Customers looking for a romcom had their own meet-cutes. “This video space was advertised as a portal to a world of experience that was transportive,” Perry explains. “At Kim’s, you had fifty thousand futures waiting for you.”

But then other, darker ideas started to creep in. Video stores started to be presented as places where your own private desires were on public display, and as such, sites of potentially uncomfortable revelation. How many times have we watched scenes where someone hides the movie they want to rent because they’ve run into a friend or family member? Suddenly visiting a video store was like buying condoms or a pregnancy test at the pharmacy. “Being in public at the video store,” the film explains, “was a cause for concern.”

Likewise the knowledge and good taste that had been ascribed to clerks early on started to metastasize in movies and TV shows into characters who were condescending, belligerent, and at the same time, pathetic. They were, Perry writes in the film, “the modern equivalent of the eternally shushing fuddy duddy librarian,” but for some reason movies and TV shows made them a thousand times more intrusive and demeaning. Who would want to deal with people or places like that?

As video stores became a staple of modern life, Perry notes how movies and TV shows went one step even further, treating them as banal, brightly-lit, cookie-cutter purgatories, each with the same basic set of movies. Perry opens the film with a clip of Ethan Hawke in Hamlet wandering the aisles of a video store. Could there be any more fitting place to ask, “To be, or not to be?”

So goes the description under the YouTube trailer for Video Heaven, which was posted today by JoBlo Movie Network. Back in the Winter 2014 issue of Cineaste, Perry was interviewed by Richard Porton, who asked the filmmaker how working at Kim's Video influenced his film education:

That overlapped with my time at NYU. I distilled it down to one point: Working at a place like that taught me not to be afraid of what I liked. Film school teaches you to be very afraid of what you like. You don't want to be the one who stands up in class and says, 'I think Sylvester Stallone is an incredible director.' You're going to look like an idiot, especially at NYU where everyone is trying to be as highbrow as possible. Working at Kim's taught me, working with people like Sean [Price Williams], to like what you like. But you have to defend what you like about these films. You could come into Kim's and say, 'I want to rent the two-tape edition of The Mother And The Whore.' Eustache is an incredible filmmaker. But you needed to defend why you were renting Staying Alive or Rocky IV. Stallone is an incredible filmmaker and even Jean Eustache respected him.

That's a lesson you'll never be taught in an academic setting—how to equally appreciate high and low cinema. At NYU, people might see Brian De Palma as a trashy filmmaker who made pulpy movies in the Eighties. When you were working at Kim's, Brian De Palma was the master.

Forty years ago, Barbara Crampton was at the beginning of her screen career when director Stuart Gordon cast her in his debut film “Re-Animator,” a wildly funny and audacious horror movie based on a short story by H.P. Lovecraft. “I had come from the theater and it was one of my first jobs,” Crampton told IndieWire. “I had worked with Brian De Palma for a minute and on a soap opera, but I think I was too green to understand that we were doing something special.”

“Re-Animator” was something special indeed, a bold and original film that not only ignored the boundaries of good taste but demolished them, yet exhibited an artistry that earned it positive reviews from critics like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert. “Re-Animator” quickly attracted a cult following, thanks to Gordon’s rollercoaster script, cinematographer Mac Ahlberg’s dynamic and expressive visual style, and performances (from Crampton as well as co-stars Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, and David Gale) that felt more grounded and assured than what one was used to seeing in low-budget horror.

Gordon who, like Crampton, had a background in theater, rehearsed the actors for three weeks before shooting, a choice that Crampton said was instrumental in giving the actors the confidence they needed to hit the ground running once the arduous low-budget shoot began. Because De Palma had been similarly thoughtful and rigorous in his approach when Crampton worked on “Body Double,” the actress was surprised to learn later how exceptional her experience on “Re-Animator” had been.

“Working with Stuart and Brian, I thought, ‘Oh, this is how it is in Hollywood,'” Crampton said. “You get three weeks of rehearsal and then you make the movie. And that’s never happened to me again.” During the rehearsal process Gordon and the actors delved into the characters’ motivations for each scene and over the course of the film as a whole, which helped Crampton stay focused during the long days covered in gore. “Most days we were on the set for a minimum of 13, 14, 16 hours, because Stuart wouldn’t stop filming. Everything on the set was slippery and gooey. But I learned to use that as part of the reality in the moment,” she said.

Well, I originally had three scenes. They were conversations with Craig Wasson, where he was trying to reconcile with me after we broke up. The day before shooting, they said they were cutting the two dialogue scenes and I'd only have the one; you know which one that is. I was like, "Darn, oh well, it's Brian De Palma; I'm sure it will lead to something." And it didn't; I'm still waiting for Brian to call me with something else. For what it's worth, we did that scene about 60 times, which was sort of interesting.

Johnny Restall, Dread Central

As in Sisters (1972), Obsession (1976), and Dressed to Kill, De Palma draws on Hitchcock’s style and themes in order to create sly pyrotechnics that are entirely his own. If the initial scenes of Jake stalking Gloria nod towards Vertigo (1958), they soon build into an extraordinarily well-choreographed ballet once they reach the Rodeo Collection mall. Largely free of dialogue, and almost entirely carried by movement and Pino Donaggio’s opulent score, it’s a jaw-dropping tour-de-force, playing with geography and perspective. Stephen H. Burum’s stunning camerawork moves up and down and left to right, using every inch of the space while tightly controlling what it wants us to see.

Sometimes we know more than the characters (as when we see the ‘Indian’ or the security guard sneak by), and sometimes we’re left as shocked as Jake by a sudden reveal. It’s an astoundingly involving sequence, particularly considering that nothing especially dramatic happens. Admittedly, it draws on Hitchcock’s techniques, but even he was rarely so deliciously audacious in scale, nor so fearless in displaying his own mischievous sleight of hand.

Most controversially, the mall scene and indeed the first half of the film revolve around a man spying on an attractive, troubled woman. Rather than play the scenes subtly, De Palma amps up the slick eroticism to cartoonish levels, as if determined to enrage those who’d considered Dressed To Kill too leering and sexist. Of course, the most implausible and overtly sexualized moments are when Jake watches ‘Gloria’ dance at her window, and these are later revealed not to be her at all. However, it’s left for the viewer to decide whether these deceptive performances by adult actress Holly Body (Melanie Griffith) are a comment on the ludicrousness of straight male fantasies, or whether they’re simply a further example of the unrepentant male gaze in cinema.

Certainly, while she has a broadly similar character arc, Shelton’s Gloria remains passive and underdeveloped compared to Angie Dickinson’s Kate in Dressed to Kill, and the scene in which she kisses Jake despite knowing he’s been following her is ridiculously unlikely (if typically stylish). Likewise, although De Palma has always denied it was intentional, Gloria’s death by drill at the hands of her estranged husband has distinctly phallic overtones, as if designed to enrage feminist critics.

Yet judging these moments in isolation overlooks their context and the deliberate contradictions that run throughout the film. If Gloria’s murder is both horrifying and exploitative (a dichotomy at the heart of all horror cinema), her killer is never portrayed as anything but repugnant. Sam Bouchard (Gregg Henry) exudes arrogance, full of untrustworthy bonhomie and casual misogyny as he ensnares the meek Jake in his schemes. His contempt for others is made chillingly clear by the shot of him standing over Gloria’s body, hands on the drill and foot on her throat, his ‘Indian’ disguise adding blithe racism to his repulsively entitled characteristics.

Further, to suggest that the murder fits with the perceived slasher trope of “punishing” sexually active women is to overlook who replaces the deceased as the new female lead. Like Liz (Nancy Allen) taking Kate’s narrative place in Dressed to Kill, the second half of Body Double belongs to Holly Body—an assertive, strong, and sexually uninhibited woman rather than the traditional virginal ‘good’ girl.

While De Palma plays with puritanical audience expectations, he seems to delight in confounding them. Whether the role of a forthright adult film star is progressive or just more male fantasy is debatable, but it certainly suggests that the director’s world is more complex than the conservative standard attributed to certain slashers. (The fact that he had already spoofed the genre at the start of Blow Out and appears to reference Amy Jones’ 1982 The Slumber Party Massacre with Sam’s choice of murder weapon further implies a playful awareness of the pleasures and limitations of the form.)

Perhaps the most provocative and confrontational aspect of Body Double is the way its games implicate us as viewers. De Palma knows that voyeurism is the essence of cinema, and the more transgressive the sights, the better. Like Jake spying on Gloria/Holly from the dark of his apartment, we know we should look away—but we can’t. It’s no accident that the prominent line of dialogue during the porno movie shoot within the film is “I like to watch”. Nor is it a coincidence that just before showing Jake the telescope that sets the plot in motion, Sam proposes a toast “to Hollywood”.

Indeed, the film’s gleefully tawdry thriller plot is arguably a trojan horse disguising a caustically witty commentary on the dreams and disappointments of Tinsel Town. It emphasizes the tedium and hard work of trying to make it: enduring hostile auditions, attending pretentious acting classes, and surviving the trials and tribulations of cheap B movies like the opening sequence’s Vampire’s Kiss. The film is littered with L.A. landmarks, from the Capitol Records Building and Tail O’ The Pup to the Chemosphere that serves as the location for Jake’s adopted home. By locating its violent climax at the L.A. Aqueduct Cascades, it places the sex, danger, and illusion of the plot on an equal footing with the water supply, as though all these elements are essential to the city.

But the sexual content with which De Palma packed Body Double is potent. He chose Melanie Griffith, then in her mid-twenties, to play porn star Holly Body. He’d met the daughter of Hitchcock star Tippi Hedren while making Scarface; she was the girlfriend of actor Steven Bauer, who plays Tony Montana’s lieutenant Manny in the movie. And Double contains a funny Scarface in-joke. Bauer appears here as one of Holly’s sexual partners in a scene from Holly Does Hollywood, one of Double’s porno-films-within-a-film. He comes into a small room where Holly sits, prepared to do her oral stuff, and is interrupted by a voice on his walkie-talkie saying “Manny, where the hell are you? We need you on set.”

Body Double’s plot is a gloss on Hitchcock’s Rear Window, with some morbid femme obsession from Vertigo tempered in. During the height of his career De Palma got a lot of critical smack for his lifts from Hitchcock, but that was unfair. He didn’t take cues from Hitchcock because he was bereft of his own ideas; he did because he knew that the stuff could be constructively and pertinently updated in explicit contemporary terms. In crude terms, it meant he got show things that Hitchcock never could. But it also meant he could make the subtexts in Hitchcock bubble up to a mordant surface.

Heights are the hero’s fear in Vertigo; in Body Double Jake Scully is claustrophobic, which makes his time in a coffin as a glitter-rock vampire (shades of De Palma’s early ‘70s quasi-glam musical Phantom of the Paradise!) in the movie’s opening less than tolerable. He freaks out, gets fired from the schlock movie he’s acting in, and now he’s got an impediment that he has to conquer in his hero’s journey. This journey finds him accepting the generosity of a fellow actor, who sets him up in a crazy ultra-modern UFO-like house in the Hollywood hills; across the way is another house with large horizontal windows and loosely space vertical blinds, and in that house a very scantily clad young woman dances with a remarkable lack of inhibition. Nice for Scully that the joint where he’s housesitting has a top-brand telescope. It’s almost too convenient, right?

And here, for all the rampant sex, corrosive inside-moviemaking humor, and general impertinent attitude, is where we hit the Problematic, in what, it happens, is the movie’s only murder. Given its grisliness, one is all Body Double needs.