The Elevator Murder Dressed to Kill
The elevator murder in Dressed to Kill -- in which Kate Miller is slashed to death by a tall blonde woman wielding a straight razorb9 -- is what De Palma considers the best murder scene he ever directed. It occurs at the thirty-minute mark, killing the film's protagonist and restructuring the narrative entirely, redirecting audience sympathy from the woman who has been murdered to the woman who witnesses the killing.b10
De Palma called it his best murder scene -- above Scarface, Blow Out, and Body Double
"I guess I would have to say Dressed to Kill, the murder in the elevator. I had a very good idea in terms of Bobbi killing Angie and Nancy witnessing it and the use of the mirrors and the slow motion." -- Brian De Palma, The Talks (2015)
"I think that's sort of the bloodiest murder I've ever done." -- Brian De Palma, The Talks (2015)
The sequence uses the elevator mirror to transfer sympathy from victim to witness
The key technical device is the parabolic mirror in the elevator ceiling. When the doors open and Liz Blake finds Kate's body, the blonde attacker is visible only in the mirror's reflection -- Liz and the killer see each other through the distorted surface.b10 The mirror shot accomplishes two things simultaneously: it reveals the killer's presence and it transfers the audience's point of identification from Kate (dying on the floor) to Liz (standing in the hallway, holding the razor she has just picked up).
The screenplay describes the moment: "the BLONDE watches LIZ, reflected in the ceiling parabolic mirror, moves toward the fallen woman... They exchange one brief shocked look."
Donaggio scored the murder as an inversion of the Herrmann Psycho cue
Pino Donaggio deliberately avoided replicating Bernard Herrmann's shrieking violin attack from Psycho's shower scene. Instead, he used the same rhythmic structure but with softer instruments -- the effect is violence scored as if it were still part of the romantic passage that preceded it. The disjunction between the lush scoring and the razor assault is part of the sequence's disorienting power.
The wedding ring forces Kate back into the building and into the path of the killer
The murder depends on a single narrative mechanism: Kate forgets her wedding ring on the stranger's bedside table. In the elevator going down, she realizes it is gone and presses the button to return upstairs.b8 The ring -- the symbol of the marriage she has just betrayed -- is what forces her back into the building and into the path of the razor. The screenplay describes the moment: "As she pulls her finger off the button she realizes she's left her wedding ring on the bedside table."
The MPAA initially gave the sequence an X rating, forcing cuts
The elevator murder was one of the primary reasons the MPAA initially assigned an X rating to Dressed to Kill. De Palma trimmed the sequence for the R-rated theatrical cut; the unrated version, approximately thirty seconds longer overall, restores closer angles on the violence. Both the Criterion and Kino Lorber home video releases present the unrated version as De Palma's preferred cut. (wikipedia)
The murder sits at beat 9 in the backbeat structure
In the Backbeats (Dressed to Kill), the elevator murder is beat 9 (the slashing itself, the Inciting Incident), with beat 8 covering Kate's elevator-descent realization that her ring is missing and her decision to return upstairs.b8 b9 Beat 10 picks up Liz pressing the call button between clients and the doors opening on Kate's body.b10 The three-beat span follows the dramatic architecture — ring forgotten, ring fatal, witness arrives — across the elevator's two arrivals.