At the time of its release, the film was a commercial failure, earning just $8.8 million at the box office against a production budget of $10 million, as well as mixed reviews, though Melanie Griffith's performance earned praise and brought her a Golden Globe nomination. Subsequently, it has been better received and is now considered to be a cult film.
Plot
Struggling actor Jake Scully has recently lost his role as a vampire in a low-budget horror film after his claustrophobia thwarts shooting. After returning home to discover his girlfriend cheating on him, Scully splits up with her and is left homeless, as the residence belongs to her. At a method acting class, where he meets Sam Bouchard, Scully reveals his fears and the childhood cause of his claustrophobia. They go to a bar where Scully is offered a place to stay; Sam's rich friend has gone on a trip to Europe and needs a house-sitter for his ultra-modern home in the Hollywood Hills.
While touring the house with Scully, Sam is especially enthusiastic about showing him one feature: a telescope, and through it a female neighbor, Gloria Revelle, who erotically dances at a specific time each night. Scully voyeuristically watches Gloria until he sees her being abused by a man she appears to know. The next day, he follows her when she goes shopping. Gloria makes calls to an unknown person whom she promises to meet. Scully also notices a disfigured "Indian", a man he had noticed watching Gloria a few days prior. Scully follows Gloria to a seaside motel where she is apparently stood up by the person she was there to meet. On the beach, the Indian suddenly appears and snatches her purse. Scully chases him into a nearby tunnel, but his claustrophobia overcomes him. Gloria walks him out of it, and they impulsively and passionately kiss before she retreats. That night, Scully again is watching through the telescope when the Indian returns and breaks into Gloria's home. Scully races to save Gloria, but her vicious white German Shepherd attacks him, and the Indian murders Gloria with a huge handheld drill.
Scully alerts the police, who rule the murder a botched robbery. However, Detective Jim McLean becomes suspicious after finding a pair of Gloria's panties in Scully's pocket. Although McLean does not arrest him, he tells Scully that his voyeuristic behavior and failure to alert police sooner helped cause Gloria's death. Later that night, suffering from insomnia and watching a pornographic television channel, Scully sees porn actress Holly Body dancing sensually, exactly as Gloria did. In order to meet Holly, he pretends to be a porn producer hiring for a new film.
Scully learns from Holly that Sam hired her to impersonate Gloria each night, dancing in the window, knowing Scully would be watching and later witness the real Gloria's murder. Offended when he suggests she was involved in a killing, Holly storms out of the house. The Indian picks her up, knocks her unconscious and drives away with her. Scully follows them to a reservoir where the Indian is digging a grave. Scully attacks him, and in the scuffle peels his face off to reveal it as a mask worn by Sam. Scully has been set up as a scapegoat by Sam, who is in fact Gloria's abusive husband Alex, to provide him with an alibi during the murder. Scully is overpowered and thrown into the grave. Though his claustrophobia initially incapacitates him again, he overcomes his fear and climbs out, and Sam is knocked into the aqueduct by the dog and drowned.
During the ending credits, Scully is shown having been recast in his previous vampire role as Holly watches from the sidelines.
The film includes appearances from real-life adult performers Linda Shaw, Alexandra Day, Cara Lott, Melissa Scott, Barbara Peckinpaugh and Annette Haven. Steven Bauer, from De Palma's previous film Scarface and Griffith's then-husband, has a cameo as a male porn actor.[5]
De Palma created the concept of the film after interviewing Angie Dickinson's body doubles for Dressed to Kill.[7] "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."[8] 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."[7][9]
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."[10]
Casting
De Palma initially wanted pornographic actress Annette Haven to play Holly, but she was rejected by the studio due to her pornographic filmography.[5] Nonetheless, Haven did appear in a minor role and consulted with DePalma about the adult film industry. De Palma then offered the role to Linda Hamilton, who turned it down in favor of The Terminator.[5]Jamie Lee Curtis, Carrie Fisher, and Tatum O'Neal were considered for the role before Melanie Griffith was cast.[5] 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."[8] 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."[11]
De Palma also considered Dutch erotic actress Sylvia Kristel for the role of Gloria, but she was unavailable. Although he cast Deborah Shelton, he found her voice to be unsuitable and had her lines dubbed by Helen Shaver in post-production.[5]
The film was initially given an X by the Motion Picture Association of America ratings board. Because many theaters refused to show X-rated films, De Palma had to re-edit the film as he did on Dressed to Kill and Scarface. De Palma cut what he called "a few minor things from the porno movie scene" and secured an R rating.[21] De Palma said Columbia did not support the film due to its excessive violence. He said, "Do you think the guys who run Coca-Cola (Columbia Pictures' parent company) want publicity about violence? They are very aware of their public images, and when they start seeing articles in The New York Times about their product and violence, they go crazy. They're not showmen. They're corporation types."[22]
Themes
Artifice and illusion
De Palma said the film deals with themes previously explored in his other films: "visualistic storytelling, a kind of obsessional voyeuristic activity, a sense of humor about the world we live in, manipulators manipulating manipulators."[21] The theme of artifice is demonstrated through Body Double's Hollywood setting—a location itself understood to be in the business of "make-believe"—characters, and plot. The title refers to the filmmaking term for a person who substitutes for another actor in scenes where the face is not shown, but it also acquires a second literal meaning in the film as the audience, along with Jake, is presented with situations intended to deceive.[21][16] The theme is also exhibited in multiple plot lines throughout, such as Jake's belief that it is Gloria he is spying on, Jake disguising himself in order to infiltrate the pornographic film shoot, and the reveal of the killer's identity.[23]
Numerous scenes call attention to their own artificiality and the film's construction, from the opening scene of a desert where the camera then pulls away to reveal the desert is in fact a matte painting on the set of a B-movie.[24][16] Critics noted that with this scene, "De Palma puts us on edge from the start...repeatedly revealing in the first few minutes that what we’re seeing isn't real — it’s all a calculated illusion intended to trick us."[24]
De Palma also makes use of rear projection techniques to emphasize artificialness. Rear projection is used in scenes where Jake drives around Los Angeles following Gloria.[17] The scene of Jake’s kiss with Gloria in front of the tunnel utilizes rear projection and functions as a direct reference to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo with its 360-degree camera shot.[25][23][24]
The scene on the porn film set soundtracked to Frankie Goes to Hollywood's song "Relax" is referred to by critics as "exhilarating" for its staging and metatextuality.[23][26][27] Filmed in one long unbroken take, the scene segues into a musical sequence without warning and prompts viewers to question whether the action is happening in the porn film itself or the larger world of Body Double.[28]
Manuela Lazic of The Film Stage noted that the scene has "Jake [playing] a parody of his nebbish self accompanied physically and musically by Frankie Goes to Hollywood", and that "the director presents a need to 'fake it 'til you make it' as absolute and inescapable. It is telling of De Palma's joyful cynicism that this scene, an apotheosis of fakery and eroticism, is probably Body Double's most memorable."[23] For the sequence, De Palma allowed his actual camera crew to be visible in shots, further blurring the lines between the film itself and the film Holly Body is making.[16]
Body Double also explores the difference between fantasy and reality as Jake becomes drawn to who he thinks is Gloria dancing in the window. As a voyeur, he attaches a fantasy to her without ever interacting with her in person. When Jake becomes compelled to follow Gloria, she becomes a flesh and blood person to him, more than an object of his fantasies.[23] On a more heightened level, when Jake has his first conversation with Holly after the filming of the porn movie, he is taken aback by her straightforwardness and assertiveness.[16] Holly, "a woman with agency, in full command of her body, career, and sexuality...[appears to be] a rebuke of the illusion Jake held of the leering, lip-licking porn star in Holly Does Hollywood".[16]
De Palma has commented on the deliberate mixing of illusion and reality, saying "It [the film] constantly plays with that. But even though there are great shifts in form, it never really alienates the audience, which is an accomplishment, I feel."[21]
Voyeurism and exhibitionism
As in his previous films such as Greetings, Hi, Mom!, Dressed to Kill, and Blow Out, De Palma addresses the theme of voyeurism.[29] Critics noted that the act of voyeurism can provide an "illusory, imaginative form of control", a feeling Jake has lost due to his demoted, emasculated position.[23][29] With Body Double, voyeurism becomes tied to exhibitionism, and is used to reflect back on the viewer. Jake, a voyeur who "likes to watch", is understood to be a stand-in for the audience.[25] Voyeurism is turned on its head as it is intimated early on that the woman Jake is peeping on knows her nightly dances are being watched, and with the eventual reveal that the routine is in fact a hired performance.[30]
The scene of Jake first encountering Holly on the set of Holly Does Hollywood is understood to be a commentary on the male gaze.[25] Jake spies Holly in a hallway mirror reflection; as he approaches her, a bathroom mirror captures Jake looking at Holly; thus, the audience is watching Jake watch Holly, who in turn is performing for the porn film and is aware of Jake's presence.
Critic David Denby observed: "Body Double is about Los Angeles, about the eroticized way of life, partly created by the media culture, in which exhibitionist and voyeur are linked by common need. The people live in houses with huge windows; they cruise one another insolently, unafraid of being watched as they watch; privacy is meaningless—there is only the sexiness of endless scrutiny and quick encounter."[31]
Satire of Hollywood
Jake and Gloria kiss as the background shows a noticeable rear projection. The scene is a direct homage to a 360-degree camera shot in Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo.
Marylynn Uricchio of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote, "De Palma throws in elements of satire and more than nods his head at the whole Hollywood tradition. There's that sweepy, heavy-handed score by Pino Donaggio that punctuates the action with a snide smile. And there’s that 360-degree kiss scene, straight out of Hitchcock, with the highly colored backgrounds of the old Technicolor films."[32] Griffith stated Body Double "is a parody of Hollywood more than anything".[11] Some critics opined that the character of "The Indian", with his garish makeup, is a reference to the old Hollywood practice of using redface to depict Native American characters.[16][25]
Critics have also pointed out that the film's juxtaposition of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking with pornography illustrates that "mainstream films use sex and sexuality in the same manner as exploitation films."[30] By blurring the boundaries between mainstream filmmaking and pornography and showing how illusionism is present in both, Body Double knowingly satirizes the world of Hollywood and its pretenses that it is more "legitimate" than the adult film world.[31]
Release
The film was previewed for Columbia Pictures executives in Van Nuys ahead of its general release.[14] De Palma says that Columbia was enthusiastic about the film until the screening.[14] Response from the audience was not strong "and the studio started to get really worried," he said. "The only people crazier than the people who criticize me for violence are the people at the studios. I can't stand that sort of cowardice."[22] De Palma and Columbia mutually agreed to end the three-picture deal.[6]
Box office
Body Double was released to theaters on October 26, 1984, the same day as The Terminator.[33] It opened at number three at the box office, earning $2.8 million in its opening weekend.[34] The film earned $8.2 million over its first three weeks, before being pulled in its fourth week.[1][2] The film earned $8.8 million on a $10 million budget, making it a box office bomb.[1][2]
Reception
Body Double debuted to a divided response, with positive reviews commending the visual style, performances and De Palma's nods to Hitchcock, and negative reviews criticizing the absurdities of the plot, describing the Hitchcock homages as derivative, and lambasting the sex and violence as vulgar.[35][36][37]Roger Ebert praised the film, giving it three and a half out of four stars and calling it "an exhilarating exercise in pure filmmaking, a thriller in the Hitchcock tradition in which there's no particular point except that the hero is flawed, weak, and in terrible danger -- and we identify with him completely."[38]
Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that De Palma "again goes too far, which is the reason to see it. It's sexy and explicitly crude, entertaining and sometimes very funny. It's his most blatant variation to date on a Hitchcock film (Vertigo), but it's also a De Palma original, a movie that might have offended Hitchcock's wryly avuncular public personality, while appealing to his darker, most private fantasies."[39] Writing for The Day, Paul Baumann said, "This is one movie that can make the horrific fascinating and still underline, in a hilarious way, the absurdity of it all."[40] David DiNicola wrote, "I could not resist [the film's] visual brilliance which without malice or cynicism holds up a mirror to the 'nature' of millions of American viewers."[41]
Griffith received critical acclaim for her performance,[24] with Canby commenting she "gives a perfectly controlled comic performance that successfully neutralizes all questions relating to plausibility. She's not exactly new to films, having played in 'Night Moves,' 'Smile' and 'The Drowning Pool' as a very young actress. What is new is the self-assured screen presence she demonstrates here, and it's one of the delights of 'Body Double.'"[39] Baumann wrote Holly's "wildly incongruous conversations with the earnest Jake get funnier and funnier as the real danger gets closer and closer" and that De Palma can turn "[Griffith's] caustic hectoring of motorists...into a charmed bit of pathos".[40]
Praise was also given to the film's visuals and camera work. Todd McCarthy of Variety stated, "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.'"[5][42]David Denby of New York gave a mixed review, but raved about De Palma's "gliding, sensual trancelike style that is the most sheerly pleasurable achievement in contemporary movies."[43] Denby singled out the scene set at the Rodeo Collection mall, writing "virtually wordless, this sustained episode accumulates a kind of suspense that is as much moral and psychological as physical".[43]
Paul Attanasio of The Washington Post positively reviewed the film, writing, "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. The movie has been carefully calculated to offend almost everyone—and probably will. But, like Hitchcock, De Palma makes the audience's reaction the real subject; 'Body Double' is about the dark longings deep inside us."[44][45]
Negative reviews opined De Palma was returning to familiar territory by riffing on Hitchcock, and that the scenes of violence cheapened the film. Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "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."[46]Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times panned the film as "elaborately empty" and "silly", suggesting that De Palma "finally may have exhausted the patience of even his most tenacious admirers."[47] In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael shared similar sentiments, writing "the big, showy scenes recall Vertigo and Rear Window so obviously that the movie is like an assault on the people who have put De Palma down for being derivative. This time, he's just about spiting himself and giving them reasons not to like him. And these big scenes have no special point, other than their resemblance to Hitchcock's work."[48] Kael added "the voyeuristic sequences, with Wasson peeping through a telescope, aren’t particularly erotic; De Palma shows more sexual feeling for the swank buildings and real estate."[48]
Some also claimed the plot is ultimately given less importance than the film's visuals.[48][49]TV Guide wrote, "Contrived, shallow, distasteful, and ultimately pointless, Body Double is more an exercise in empty cinematic style than an engrossing thriller. Although cinematographer Burum executes some absolutely breathtaking camera moves, his effort goes for naught when pitted against director De Palma and cowriter Avrech's insipid narrative."[50] Rita Kempley of The Washington Post described the film as a horror comedy, but said it comes off as "sadistic" and does not find a balance "between the comic and the macabre".[36]
The film was criticized for a violent scene involving a woman that many described as an example of sexualized violence.[37][51][52] "Women in peril work better in the suspense genre," said De Palma. "It all goes back to the Perils of Pauline...I don't think morality applies to art. It’s a ludicrous idea. I mean, what is the morality of a still life? I don’t think there’s good or bad fruit in the bowl."[53] In the scene in question, a character is killed by a power drill; though the drill is never shown entering the body, it is suggestively framed as a phallus.[6][35][54] De Palma said it "was not my intention to create a sexual image with the drill, although it could be construed that way."[53][55] David Denby noted the film's "violence is so outlandish that only the literal-minded should be able to take it seriously",[43] and argued that its gaudiness appears to address De Palma's detractors "who talk of violence in his films as if it were the real thing", or those who cannot distinguish between the image and actual violence.[56] The London Clinic for Battered Women asked Columbia Pictures for a percentage of the profits from the film, claiming it was "blood money" for using "the victimization of women as a source of massive profit."[57]
In following decades, Body Double underwent a critical reassessment and developed a cult following, with critics citing its directorial and aesthetic indulgences,[16][23] its early 1980s new wave soundtrack, homages to Alfred Hitchcock,[62] and the use of iconic Los Angeles locations.[16][63] Critic Sean Axmaker said that with distance, the film can more easily be seen as a satire of the 1980s era of excess and an image-obsessed culture.[26]
Writing of the 2013 Blu-ray release of the film, Chuck Bowen of Slant Magazine said, "Body Double's consciously derivative thriller plot is as dense with meta-text as any film in De Palma’s career; the searing personal material, which has been buried underneath the film’s superficial happenings with precision and élan, must be discovered with the eyes."[64] Critic Christy Lemire wrote, "What's real, what's imagined and what's movie magic remain mysteries until the end. But the winding road through the hills to get there is always a wind-in-your-hair thrill."[24]
Critics have also commented on how the second half of the film is a subversive commentary on the first part. In an essay for Bright Wall/Dark Room magazine, Travis Woods wrote, "just as the film's reflexive second hour is De Palma’s counter-critique to his critics, it is also a gear-shift into Holly's world, a nightscape L.A. wherein De Palma subverts the tropes he littered throughout the film's first half by employing the postmodern grimy-sticky grit of VHS porn, MTV-styled music video theatrics, and the twisting of a traditional hero's journey dropped into the duplicitous hell of Me-Decade Hollywood."[16]
On the film's finale, Bowen added: "De Palma pulls the entire rug out from underneath the film's reality and turns everything we've just seen into a prolonged Brechtianshaggy-dog joke, only to then pull the rug out from under that joke and halfheartedly reaffirm the film's reality as a mystery-thriller. By the end of this masterpiece, one of the great and most uniquely American films of the 1980s, we only trust surfaces, which are as fleeting and illusory as anything else."[64]
In 2016, Mark Olsen of the Los Angeles Times named Body Double as one of De Palma's "underrated gems" of the 1980s, stating, "Even more than 'Dressed to Kill' or 'Blow Out,' for me 'Body Double' is the most quintessentially Brian De Palma movie of what might be thought of as his 'high period' — that late-'70s, early-'80s moment when he was making relatively high-budget, high-profile movies that culminated in 'The Untouchables.'"[65] In 2023, IndieWire listed Body Double as number 30 on their list of The 100 Best Movies of the '80s.[28]
Griffith and Wasson's performances have also been the focus of praise. Lemire wrote, "The scene in [Holly] explains to [Jake] what she will and will not do on camera is a perfect encapsulation of Griffith's charm. She's girlishly angelic but also startlingly no-nonsense. She’s a much smarter cookie than she gets credit for being and her comic timing is slyly perfect."[24] Manuela Lazic of The Film Stage said, "As central character Jake Scully, Wasson turns his conventionally attractive looks into an endlessly fascinating nebbishness and awkwardness. In an early scene, Jake simply walks to his car and jumps in the driver’s seat, yet Wasson manages to turn this casual action into one of the most amusing instances of purposefully bad acting."[23]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 78% of 37 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.2/10.The website's consensus reads: "Exemplifying Brian De Palma's filmmaking bravura and polarizing taste, Body Double is a salacious love letter to moviemaking."[66]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 69 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[67]
In a 2016 interview with The Guardian, De Palma reflected on the film's initial critical reception, saying "Body Double was reviled when it came out. Reviled. It really hurt. I got slaughtered by the press right at the height of the women's liberation movement...I thought it was completely unjustified. It was a suspense thriller, and I was always interested in finding new ways to kill people."[68]
In an interview with Matt Zoller Seitz, De Palma was asked about his thoughts on criticism of the film as misogynistic. He said, "I just was making those movies when women’s liberation movement was at its political peak, and they focused on violence in particular. It’s a kind of basic element of the genre, and just because the political atmosphere changes doesn’t make it any more valid."[69]
Griffith later gave credit to the film and the accolades she garnered for her performance for helping to launch her career after an absence from films.[5] The film helped reintroduce the song "Relax" in America, where it recharted and reached the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1985.[70]
Home media
Body Double was first released to DVD in 1998 with widescreen and pan and scan formats.[12] On October 3, 2006, the film was released as a Special Edition DVD by Sony Pictures .[12] The DVD included the featurettes "The Seduction," "The Setup," "The Mystery," and "The Controversy," all of which cover different aspects of the production and contain interviews with Brian De Palma, Melanie Griffith, Deborah Shelton, and Gregg Henry.[12]
On August 13, 2013, the film was released to Blu-ray by Twilight Time.[64] Special features from the 2006 DVD were ported over. On October 24, 2016, the film was re-released as a Limited Edition Blu-ray from Indicator Series.[71] It included previously released features as well as an interview with Craig Wasson, the documentary Pure Cinema from first assistant directorJoe Napolitano, and an illustrated booklet containing an essay by film critic Ashley Clark, a Film Comment interview of De Palma in 1984 by journalist Marcia Pally, and an article from a May 1987 issue of Film Comment in which De Palma gives a personal guide of his favorite films.[71]
The Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho repeatedly refers to Body Double as the favorite film of the serial killer Patrick Bateman because of the power drill scene.[72] 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.[73]
Brian Russell De Palma is an American film director and screenwriter. With a career spanning over 50 years, he is best known for work in the suspense, crime and psychological thriller genres. His films include mainstream box office hits such as Carrie (1976), Dressed to Kill (1980), Scarface (1983), The Untouchables (1987), and Mission: Impossible (1996), as well as cult favorites such as Sisters (1972), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Blow Out (1981), Casualties of War (1989), and Carlito's Way (1993).
Dressed to Kill is a 1980 American erotic psychological thriller film written and directed by Brian De Palma, and starring Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson and Nancy Allen. It depicts the events leading up to the brutal murder of a New York City housewife (Dickinson) before following a prostitute (Allen) who witnesses the crime, and her attempts to solve it with the help of the victim's son. It contains several direct references to Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho.
Ginger Lynn Allen is an American pornographic actress and model who was a premier adult-entertainment star of the 1980s. She also had minor roles in various B movies. Adult Video News ranked her at #7 of the 50 greatest porn stars of all time in 2002. After ending her pornography career, she began using her full name and found work in a variety of B-movies. She had a late-career return to the adult industry and made a brief series of movies. Allen is a member of AVN, NightMoves Adult Entertainment, and XRCO Halls of Fame.
Rear Window is a 1954 American mystery thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and written by John Michael Hayes based on Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story "It Had to Be Murder". Originally released by Paramount Pictures, the film stars James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey, Thelma Ritter, and Raymond Burr. It was screened at the 1954 Venice Film Festival.
Vertigo is a 1958 American psychological thriller film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock. The story was based on the 1954 novel D'entre les morts by Boileau-Narcejac. The screenplay was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor. The film stars James Stewart as former police detective John "Scottie" Ferguson, who has retired because an incident in the line of duty has caused him to develop acrophobia and vertigo, a false sense of rotational movement. Scottie is hired by an acquaintance, Gavin Elster, as a private investigator to follow Gavin's wife, Madeleine, who is behaving strangely.
Bernard Herrmann was an American composer and conductor best known for his work in composing for films. As a conductor, he championed the music of lesser-known composers. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest film composers. Alex Ross writes that "Over four decades, he revolutionized movie scoring by abandoning the illustrative musical techniques that dominated Hollywood in the 1930s and imposing his own peculiar harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary."
Annette Haven is an American former pornographic actress popular during the 1970s and 1980s.
In filmmaking, a double is a person who substitutes for another actor such that the person's face is not shown. There are various terms associated with a double based on the specific body part or ability they serve as a double for, such as stunt double, "dance double", "butt double" and "hand double".
Blow Out is a 1981 American neo-noir mystery thriller film written and directed by Brian De Palma. The film stars John Travolta as Jack Terry, a movie sound effects technician from Philadelphia who, while recording sounds for a low-budget slasher film, unintentionally captures audio evidence of an assassination involving a presidential hopeful. Nancy Allen stars as Sally Bedina, a young woman involved in the crime. The supporting cast includes John Lithgow and Dennis Franz. The film's tagline in advertisements was, "Murder has a sound all of its own".
Obsession is a 1976 American neo-noir psychological thriller film directed by Brian De Palma, starring Cliff Robertson, Geneviève Bujold, and John Lithgow. The screenplay was written by Paul Schrader, from a story by De Palma and Schrader. Bernard Herrmann provided the film's soundtrack before his death in 1975. The story is about a prominent New Orleans businessman who is haunted by guilt following the death of his wife and daughter during a kidnapping-rescue attempt gone wrong. Years later, he meets and falls in love with a young woman who is the exact look-alike of his long dead wife.
Sisters is a 1972 American psychological horror film directed by Brian De Palma and starring Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, and Charles Durning. It follows a French Canadian model's separated conjoined twin who is suspected of having committed a brutal murder witnessed by a newspaper reporter in Staten Island, New York City.
Femme Fatale is a 2002 erotic thriller film written and directed by Brian De Palma. The film stars Antonio Banderas and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos. It was screened out of competition at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.
Craig Wasson is an American actor. He made his film debut in Rollercoaster (1977). He is best known for his roles as Jake Scully in Brian DePalma's Body Double (1984), and Neil Gordon in Chuck Russell's A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987). For his role as Danilo Prozor in Arthur Penn's Four Friends (1981), he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. As Chuck Morgan the Bob Newhart show season 5 Episode 17 (1977)
Raising Cain is a 1992 American psychological horror thriller film written and directed by Brian De Palma, and starring John Lithgow, Lolita Davidovich and Steven Bauer.
The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 1990 American satirical black comedy film directed and produced by Brian De Palma and starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Kim Cattrall, and Morgan Freeman. The screenplay, written by Michael Cristofer, was adapted from the bestselling 1987 novel of the same name by Tom Wolfe.
The Sinister Urge is a 1960 crime drama film that was written, directed and co-produced by Ed Wood. It starred Kenne Duncan, Duke Moore, Dino Fantini, Jean Fontaine, Harvey Dunn and Conrad Brooks.
The erotic thriller is a film subgenre defined as a thriller with a thematic basis in illicit romance or erotic fantasy. Though exact definitions of the erotic thriller can vary, it is generally agreed "bodily danger and pleasure must remain in close proximity and equally important to the plot." Most erotic thrillers contain scenes of softcore sex and nudity, though the frequency and explicitness of those scenes can differ from film to film.
Hitchcockian films are those made by various filmmakers, with the styles and themes similar to those of Alfred Hitchcock.
Cat Chaser is a 1989 American heist film directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Peter Weller and Kelly McGillis, based on the 1982 novel of the same name by Elmore Leonard. It was adapted from the novel by Leonard and James Borelli.
De Palma is a 2015 American documentary film directed by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow about the director and screenwriter Brian De Palma. The documentary features clips from his films starring various frequent collaborators like Al Pacino, John Lithgow, Tom Cruise, Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage, Sean Connery, Michael Caine, John Travolta and various others.
↑ F. Knapp, Laurence, ed. (2003). Brian De Palma: Interviews. Conversations with Filmmakers Series. University Press of Mississippi. pp.90–91. ISBN978-1578065165. Retrieved September 2, 2023.
1 2 Axmaker, Sean (October 21, 2013). "Body Double On Blu-Ray". Turner Classic Movies. Archived from the original on October 18, 2020. Retrieved August 24, 2023.
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