The Controversy (Body Double) Body Double

De Palma built the film as a deliberate provocation and got exactly the backlash he invited

Body Double was controversial by design. De Palma told Esquire before the film opened that he intended to push past every boundary:

"If they want an X, they'll get a real X! They wanna see suspense, they wanna see terror, they wanna see sex — I'm the person for the job." — Brian De Palma, Esquire (1984) (paywalled, not available online)

He was more specific with The Philadelphia Inquirer:

"I'm going to give them everything they hate and more of it than they've ever seen." — Brian De Palma, The Philadelphia Inquirer (February 1984)

The result was a film that combined Hitchcock-homage voyeurism, graphic violence against a woman via power drill, a detour through the pornography industry, and explicit sexuality — all in one package. The MPAA gave the first cut an X rating. De Palma made minor cuts, mostly to the porn-film scenes, and secured an R. But the ratings battle became part of the film's public identity. (wikipedia)

Women's advocacy groups demanded Columbia share its profits as "blood money"

The controversy went beyond critics' columns. The London Clinic for Battered Women formally protested the film, requesting that Columbia Pictures provide a percentage of the profits. They called it "blood money" — compensation for "the victimization of women as a source of massive profit." (globe and mail, The Globe and Mail, December 15, 1984, p. M.8)

Women Against Pornography, which had already protested De Palma's Dressed to Kill (1980), was vocal in its opposition to Body Double. The group had picketed theaters showing Dressed to Kill four years earlier, and Body Double — with its drill murder, its pornography subplot, and its extended voyeuristic sequences — gave them a larger target. (wikipedia)

Critics who condemned the film focused on the eroticization of violence against women

The negative reviews were not just bad — they were angry. The charges centered on De Palma's treatment of women: eroticized bodies subjected to spectacular violence, with the camera lingering on both.

"The sleazy material he's peddling feeds largely on a vision of women as objects to be ogled or butchered." — David Sterritt, The Christian Science Monitor (November 1984)

Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune drew a specific line at The Drill Murder:

"When the drill came onto the screen, De Palma lost me and control of his movie. At that point Body Double ceased to be a homage to Hitchcock and instead became a cheap splatter film, and not a very good one at that." — Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune (1984) (paywalled, not available online)

Sheila Benson in the Los Angeles Times called the film "elaborately empty, silly and desperately derivative." Rita Kempley in the Washington Post called it "sadistic." Barry Norman, the BBC's film reviewer, said De Palma had "nothing better to do with his female characters than to treat them as objects subject to extreme violence." (tcm, ica)

Defenders argued the violence was too outlandish to be taken literally

Not everyone read the film as misogyny. Several prominent critics argued that De Palma was making a film about the culture of sex and violence, not simply reproducing it.

"Body Double is 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." — Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com (1984)

David Denby in New York magazine dismissed the violence charges directly:

The "violence is so outlandish that only the literal-minded should be able to take it seriously." — David Denby, New York (1984) (sourced via wikipedia, original not verified)

Vincent Canby in the New York Times sidestepped the controversy entirely, praising the film as "a De Palma original" and singling out Melanie Griffith's "perfectly controlled comic performance." The split between Canby's enthusiastic review and the hostile notices elsewhere illustrated how completely the film divided the critical establishment. (wikipedia)

De Palma argued that suspense requires female vulnerability and that morality doesn't apply to art

De Palma's defense of the film was characteristically blunt. In a People magazine interview, he addressed the misogyny charge head-on:

"I have a lot of women victims in my movies. I also have a lot of men victims. But women in peril work better in the suspense genre." — Brian De Palma, People (December 1984) (paywalled, not available online)

He rejected the premise that filmmakers bore moral responsibility for their images:

"I don't think morality applies to art. It's a ludicrous idea." — Brian De Palma, People (December 1984) (paywalled, not available online)

On the specific charge that violent films caused real-world harm:

"I don't feel there's any connection. I subscribe to the Aristotelian theory. I believe that movies purge you of these emotions." — Brian De Palma, People (December 1984) (paywalled, not available online)

He also pushed back against the framing that he was uniquely culpable:

"I'm always attacked for having an erotic, sexist approach — chopping up women, putting women in peril. I'm making suspense movies!" — Brian De Palma, ICA Bulletin

The controversy cost De Palma his Columbia Pictures deal

The backlash had material consequences. Columbia Pictures, then owned by Coca-Cola, grew nervous after a poorly received preview screening in Van Nuys. De Palma understood the corporate dynamics:

"Do you think the guys who run Coca-Cola want publicity about violence?... They're not showmen. They're corporation types." — Brian De Palma, The Boston Globe (October 1984)

De Palma and Columbia mutually agreed to end their three-picture deal after Body Double's commercial failure. The combination of controversy, poor reviews, and an $8.8 million domestic gross against a $10 million budget made De Palma toxic to the studio. His next film, Wise Guys (1986), was a lightweight comedy that looked like a retreat. He didn't recover commercially until The Untouchables (1987). (wikipedia)

Decades later, De Palma framed the backlash as a product of its political moment

In a 2016 Guardian interview, De Palma placed the controversy in a broader cultural context:

"Body Double was reviled when it came out... I got slaughtered by the press right at the height of the women's liberation movement." — Brian De Palma, The Guardian (2016)

The timing was real. By 1984, Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975) had reshaped academic film criticism, and the anti-pornography feminist movement — led by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon — was at its peak of cultural influence. Body Double arrived at the exact moment when the politics of screen violence and the politics of gender were most tightly intertwined.

The film's reassessment has been gradual but significant. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus, aggregated decades later from 29 reviews, sits at 79% — a number that would have seemed impossible in 1984. The modern consensus recognizes both sides: "Exemplifying Brian De Palma's filmmaking bravura and polarizing taste, Body Double is a salacious love letter to moviemaking." (rottentomatoes)