Body Double

An unemployed actor is drawn into a world of voyeurism, seduction, mystery and murder, in Brian De Palma's playful and satirical homage to Hitchcock.

Jake, an unemployed actor, is asked to house-sit a luxurious hillside apartment. As a bonus, the home offers Jake a telescopic peek into the bedroom of Gloria, who nightly performs a striptease. When Jake discovers another man is also spying on Gloria, he begins an obsessive surveillance of her. Soon a murder leads him into the world of X-rated film where he meets porn queen, Holly Body.

Hailed by Roger Ebert upon its release as “an exhilarating exercise in pure filmmaking”, De Palma's sensationally stylish - and sensationalist - thriller was widely understood to be his rejoinder to critics who complained that he was always copying Hitchcock. The result is his most shameless homage to the Master of Suspense, but in its delirious, gleeful excess also one of De Palma's signature works.