Plot Summary (Body Double) Body Double
Jake Scully loses everything in a single day
Jake Scully (Craig Wasson (in Body Double, as actor)) 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. The director sends him home. He drives back 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 (in Body Double, as actor)) 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 Brian De Palma (in Body Double, as director) 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 (in Body Double, as actor)), 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, meets Holly on set, and eventually traces the entire scheme back to Sam — who is really Gloria's husband Alexander Revelle, acting under a disguise. The apartment, the telescope, the erotic dance, the disfigured stalker — all of it was an elaborate trap designed 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, buried alive by Sam at a reservoir — where he must overcome the claustrophobia that defined him at the start. He flashes back to the vampire-film set and pushes through the paralysis, breaks free, and fights Sam. Gloria's German Shepherd knocks Sam into the aqueduct. The film ends with Jake back on the vampire movie set, successfully completing the coffin scene he could not do before. The final shot collapses the boundary between the film-within-the-film and the film itself.