The Drill Murder Body Double

The scene that nearly got the film an X rating

The murder of Gloria Revelle is the film's most notorious sequence. The killer — disguised as a disfigured "Indian" — breaks into her house and kills her with a full-size industrial power drill. The drill penetrates the ceiling of the room below, and blood pours through. De Palma stages it as pure Grand Guignol, holding the camera on the violence far longer than genre convention demanded.

The MPAA forced cuts to avoid an X rating

The original cut received an X rating from the MPAA, primarily because of this scene and the combination of sexuality and violence throughout the film. De Palma made cuts to secure an R rating, but the version in theaters was still considered extreme by 1984 standards. The ratings battle became part of the film's publicity — and part of the critical conversation around whether De Palma was a provocateur or an exploiter. (wikipedia)

De Palma used the drill as a phallic literalization of the film's voyeurism theme

The weapon choice is not arbitrary. The industrial drill is a grotesquely phallic instrument, and its use against a woman who has been the object of the camera's (and Jake's, and the audience's) voyeuristic gaze makes explicit what slasher films usually leave implicit: the connection between sexual looking and violence. This reading was widely noted by critics and scholars — some as a critique of the genre, others as complicity with it.

The scene echoes and escalates De Palma's earlier shower scenes

De Palma had already restaged Hitchcock's Psycho shower scene in Dressed to Kill (1980), where Angie Dickinson's character is slashed in an elevator. The drill murder in Body Double escalates the same structure: an eroticized woman, observed by the camera, destroyed by a phallic weapon. But where Dressed to Kill at least preserved some ambiguity about intent, the drill murder is so extreme it forces the question — is De Palma indicting this pattern or indulging it?

Critics still disagree on whether the scene is critique or complicity

The drill murder remains the single most divisive scene in De Palma's filmography. Defenders read it as a deliberate, self-aware deconstruction of slasher violence. Detractors read it as exactly the misogynistic exploitation it claims to critique. De Palma has consistently refused to adjudicate between the two readings.