Body Double

The film was based on an idea of Brian de Palma. He says he got it when interviewing Angie Dickinson's body doubles for Dressed to Kill.[6] " 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."[7]

"This is going to be a movie in the De Palma style and tradition," he said. "An erotic thriller. It has a voyeuristic theme, about people being sucked into the things they're watching. A wild, erotic roller-coaster ride, so many twists and turns. I've watched audiences jump before, or seen them sit bolt upright in their seats. But I can't wait to watch an audience when they see this movie. They've never seen anything like this before."[6]

De Palma had admired a script written by Robert Avrech and hired Avrech to write the script. Avrech later said "Both Brian and I were, and are, huge fans of Alfred Hitchcock's movies. Together we screened Rear Window and Vertigo, and discussed the narrative strategies Hitch used in both films. So in a sense, I was working off of De Palma's ideas of Hitchcock's ideas."[8]

De Palma said he decided to use a drill as a murder instrument because "I do a lot of murder mysteries, and after a while you get tired of the usual instruments. You can use a knife, a rope, but now we have electrical instruments, which are truly terrifying." He added a drill was big enough to be seen by the character across a canyon. "It was not my intention to create a sexual image with the drill, although it could be construed that way."[9]

The film was criticised for its violence towards women. "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."[9]

"If this one doesn't get an X, nothing I ever do is going to," he said at the time. "This is going to be the most erotic and surprising and thrilling movie I know how to make."[6]

Director Brian De Palma originally considered Annette Haven to play the lead female role. Before filming he commented, "I'm already thinking of casting. I don't know if there're any good young porno stars out here, but the older ones - Annette Haven, Seka - some of them can really act. And Annette Haven has a terrific body."[10]

However he changed his mind and cast Melanie Griffith. "I discovered that using a real person to play a fictional counterpart doesn't necessarily make the character more real," he said.[11]

De Palma later said that Haven "was an enormous amount of help" to him in his understanding of the adult film industry and what Holly's background might be "But in the end I looked at her screen test and at Melanie's and there was really no comparison" as Griffith brougt "a comic edge that I wanted to be a major part of the tone of the second half of the movie."[7]

"I think I gave her a great amount of intelligence," said Griffith. "I used to think I didn't want any more nymphet roles, but now I think I can bring a lot of life to that kind of character."[12]

Slavitza Jovan, who appeared as Gozer the Gozerian in Ghostbusters the same year, 1984,[13] briefly appears as a saleslady.[14]

Prolific voice actor Rob Paulsen appears in the film as a cameraman for a pornographic film where he famously utters "Where's the cum shot?".[15]

Body Double contains a film within a film sequence in which pop band Frankie Goes to Hollywood performs their song "Relax"[16] on the set of a porn film, and in which scream queen Brinke Stevens,[14] and adult actresses Cara Lott and Annette Haven appear.

Filming started January 30, 1984.[17]

The film was shot in the Los Angeles area and includes such locations as Tail o' the Pup, the Beverly Center, Barney's Beanery, the LA Farmer's Market, the Rodeo Collection mall on Rodeo Drive, the Spruce Goose dome in Long Beach, the Hollywood Tower and adjacent Hollywood Freeway, Tower Records, and the Chemosphere futuristic house.[18]

The film was highly controversial due to its sex and violence.[20]

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."[21] 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."[22] 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 DePalma's usually sinister contemplation. Unfortunately, most of the film consists of visual riffs on Alfred Hitchcock, particularly 'Vertigo' and 'Rear Window.'"[23] 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."[24] Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times panned the film as "elaborately empty, silly and desperately derivative," and suggested that De Palma "finally may have exhausted the patience of even his most tenacious admirers."[25] Paul Attanasio of The Washington Post wrote, "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."[26]

"Body Double was reviled when it came out," said De Palma. "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.” [27]

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."[28]

The film opened at number three at the box office earning $2.8 million.[29]

The film developed a cult following, perhaps due to its directorial and aesthetic indulgences, its early 1980s new wave soundtrack, and the use of iconic Los Angeles locations. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 79% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 33 reviews, with an average rating of 6.31/10. The critical consensus reads: "Exemplifying Brian De Palma's filmmaking bravura and polarizing taste, Body Double is a salacious love letter to moviemaking."[30]

The film's trailer won a Clio Award in 1984.[31]

Body Double is referenced repeatedly throughout the Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho as the favorite film of the protagonist serial killer Patrick Bateman. He mentions that he has seen the film 37 times and rents the tape of it from a video store several times in the story. He also repeats scenes from the film to the reader or to other characters.