Curator Watchlist
A glossy, perverse Hollywood noir that turns voyeurism, sex, and movie-making into one delirious package. It’s messy on purpose, but the style, suspense, and outrageous set pieces make it a standout for viewers who like their thrillers heightened and self-aware.
Where to watch: Buy
Thu · 1h 54m
Director: Brian De Palma
Starring: Craig Wasson, Melanie Griffith, Gregg Henry
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.
Brian De Palma
Craig Wasson, Melanie Griffith, Gregg Henry
A glossy, perverse Hollywood noir that turns voyeurism, sex, and movie-making into one delirious package. It’s messy on purpose, but the style, suspense, and outrageous set pieces make it a standout for viewers who like their thrillers heightened and self-aware.
Body Double is one of those movies that feels like it’s constantly winking at you while also trying to unnerve you. De Palma takes the bones of a classic voyeur thriller and pushes them into neon-soaked, sexually charged Hollywood absurdity, where every mirror, window, and camera angle seems to be part of the joke and the threat at once.
What makes it endure is the sheer confidence of the filmmaking. The movie is shamelessly artificial in the best way: split screens, elaborate camera moves, and a killer pop-music sequence that turns sleaze into spectacle. It’s funny, nasty, and compulsively watchable, even when it’s being deliberately excessive.
It won’t work for everyone, especially if you need your thrillers to behave themselves. But for viewers who enjoy cinema that is both critique and indulgence, Body Double is a sharp, lurid time capsule of 1980s Hollywood paranoia and desire.
anna (4.5★) · 2997 likes
“I’m the guy who almost fucked you at the beach today“
Neil Bahadur (5★) · 2715 likes
"I should have known the moment you told me I had a terriffic smile! No real producer would have told me that in a million years!" Recently, Steven Bauer recalled running into Martin Scorsese after the premiere of Scarface in 1983, and remembered him saying: “They’re going to hate this film in Hollywood…because it’s about them.” It's hard not to think about this quote while watching this film as well. Also it's important to remember that De Palma made this… more
Patrick Willems (4★) · 2397 likes
I believe scientists have confirmed that the Frankie Goes to Hollywood scene is the peak of 1980s cinema.
Carol Grant (4.5★) · 1902 likes
brian de palma really went and said "what if i remade both Rear Window and Vertigo at the same time, but, like, really really horny"
Jake Cole (5★) · 1485 likes
Perhaps not quite the best De Palma movie (I might give the edge to Carlito's Way or Hi, Mom!), but it is THE Brian De Palma movie. Split diopters, mirror surfaces, garish and distancing set design, intricate camera movements, and sexist depictions that viciously target the heart of mainstream cinema's inherent misogyny. It's all part and parcel of De Palma's techinque, and it's all pushed to the breaking point in this recursive Moebius Strip of exploitation. Scorsese said of BDP's
Another sleek, provocative De Palma thriller that blends suspense, sexuality, and formal bravura.
A paranoid, highly stylized thriller about watching, listening, and the danger of cinematic perception.
The essential obsession-and-double narrative that underpins so much of this film’s psychology.
The foundational voyeur thriller, with the same tension between looking and culpability.
A masterclass in paranoia and surveillance, with a similarly anxious relationship to observation.
Dreamlike Los Angeles mystery where identity, desire, and performance collapse into one another.
A glossy LA noir with a hard-boiled surface and a corrupt, sexual undercurrent.
A sharp, seductive crime thriller that weaponizes sex, manipulation, and noir attitude.
A moody, adult thriller that leans into erotic tension and urban unease.
A quintessential steamy noir about desire, deception, and self-destruction.
A lush, twisty tale of seduction, deception, and shifting identities with meticulous craft.
A mainstream erotic thriller that channels obsession and escalating dread.
voyeurism, obsession, identity and doubles, Hollywood satire, sexual paranoia, performance and illusion, crime and mystery, media and spectacle
erotic thriller, neo-noir, 1980s, voyeurism, Hollywood, camp, psychosexual, stylized direction, suspense, satire