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.b1 The director sends him home.b1 He drives back and catches his girlfriend in bed with another man.b3 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.b5 b6
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).b7 b8 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.b8 Jake is hooked. He begins watching Gloria Revelle (Deborah Shelton) obsessively.b9 b12
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.b13 b14 b16 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.b18 He tries to intervene but arrives too late.b18 Detective McLean dismantles Jake at the crime scene — working through the credit card / card key distinction Jake missed, producing the underwear Jake picked up out of the trash, and revealing he had been working the husband angle until Jake's testimony about an Indian killer blocked it.b19
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.b20 b21 The dancer is Holly Body (Melanie Griffith (in Body Double, as actor)), a porn actress.b20 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.b28
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.b22 b23 b25 b29 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.b31
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.b35 The sky tunnels away above the grave; Sam plays director, calling "Action" as he shovels. Jake's mind crosses into a hallucinated version of the Vampire's Kiss coffin set — wearing the grave clothes, not the vampire costume — and refuses the freeze with the line "I can help myself."b36 He grabs the shovel Sam is holding and hauls himself up; the husband's German shepherd, left in the car the whole time, jumps from the window and knocks Sam into the aqueduct.b38 Holly accuses Jake of necrophilia in the post-fight grave-impasse — "I'm not dead yet."b39 The film closes with Jake back on the Vampire's Kiss shower-scene set, his role restored, while the closing credits play out the body-double substitution process step by step — bar, body-double swap, intercut of face and breasts, the bite, the blood.b40 The final image collapses the boundary between the film-within-the-film and the film itself.b40