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.

Later that night, suffering from insomnia and watching a pornographic television channel, Scully sees porn actress Holly Body dancing sensually, exactly as Gloria did.

The film includes appearances from real-life adult performers Linda Shaw, Alexandra Day, Cara Lott, Melissa Scott, Barbara Peckinpaugh and Annette Haven.

[5] After De Palma's successes of Carrie, Dressed to Kill and his remake of Scarface, Columbia Pictures offered him a three-picture deal with Body Double set to be the first.

"[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.

[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.

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.

[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.

[17] The scene of Jake's kiss with Gloria in front of the tunnel uses rear projection and functions as a direct reference to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo with its 360-degree camera shot.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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.

[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.

"[40] The Schenectady Gazette's Dan 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.

'"[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.

In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael shared "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.

"[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] Kael added that "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.

[46][48] 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.

[6][35][52] In a review that awarded two-and-a-half stars out of four, Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune wrote, "When the drill came onto the screen, De Palma lost me and control of his movie.

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.

"[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.

The website's consensus reads: "Exemplifying Brian De Palma's filmmaking bravura and polarizing taste, Body Double is a salacious love letter to moviemaking.

[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.

[5][48] 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.