Body Double: De Palma's Hitchcock-and-Sleaze Provocation

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Brian De Palma made Body Double in 1984 as a deliberate provocation, and the provocation still works. Coming off the enormous, blood-soaked Scarface, he turned to the smaller, dirtier obsession that had shadowed his whole career — the act of watching — and built a thriller so nakedly indebted to Alfred Hitchcock that critics at the time treated it as plagiarism dressed up as homage. That reading misses the joke. De Palma knew exactly what he was quoting, and the film is a sustained argument about voyeurism conducted through the vocabulary of the director who invented cinematic voyeurism in the first place.

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Body Double: De Palma's Hitchcock-and-Sleaze Provocation