Plot Summary (Body Double) Body Double
Jake Scully loses everything in a single day
Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) is a B-movie actor working on a low-budget vampire film. He suffers from severe claustrophobia — a condition that freezes him during a take when he's locked in a coffin. He's fired. He drives home and catches his girlfriend in bed with another man. Homeless, jobless, and humiliated, he's at the lowest point of his life when he meets Sam Bouchard (Gregg Henry) at an acting class.
Bouchard offers a voyeur's paradise
Sam offers Jake his apartment while he's out of town — a sleek modernist house perched above the Hollywood Hills (The Chemosphere House). The place comes with one feature Sam is eager to show off: a telescope trained on the window of a neighboring house, where a beautiful woman performs an erotic dance every night. Jake is hooked. He begins watching Gloria Revelle (Deborah Shelton) obsessively.
The watching turns dangerous
Jake follows Gloria during the day — through a mall, along the beach — telling himself he's protecting her from a disfigured man who seems to be stalking her. But De Palma stages this as a sequence straight out of Vertigo: Jake is the one doing the stalking, and the audience is complicit.
One night, watching through the telescope, Jake sees Gloria attacked and killed with an industrial power drill. He tries to intervene but arrives too late. The murder is staged as a robbery, and the police treat it as such. Jake knows better — he saw the disfigured man enter the house.
The porn industry leads Jake to the truth
Watching late-night television, Jake sees a woman performing the same erotic dance Gloria did — the same choreography, move for move. The dancer is Holly Body (Melanie Griffith), a porn actress. Jake realizes the dance was a setup: Holly was hired to perform in Gloria's window to keep him watching, to make him a witness to an alibi.
To find Holly, Jake enters the adult film industry. He auditions for a role in a porn film directed by Sam — who Jake now realizes is not who he claimed to be. The entire apartment, the telescope, the erotic dance, the "Indian" stalker — all of it was an elaborate trap designed by Sam (really Gloria's husband, acting under a disguise) to create a witness who would confirm that Gloria was alive during the time of the murder.
Jake confronts his claustrophobia to survive
The climax forces Jake underground — literally, into a tunnel — where he must overcome the claustrophobia that defined him at the start. He survives. Sam is caught. The film ends with Jake back on the vampire movie set, successfully completing the coffin scene he couldn't do before. The final shot collapses the boundary between the film-within-the-film and the film itself.