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. Brian De Palma (in Body Double, as director) 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 chose the drill for a practical reason that produced a phallic reading
De Palma's explanation for the weapon was characteristically blunt:
"An Indian wants to be witnessed breaking into a safe by the Craig Wasson character. The prop had to be big for Craig to see him across the canyon." — Brian De Palma, Cinephilia & Beyond
The sexual reading followed inevitably, and De Palma was characteristically unapologetic:
"It was not my intention to create a sexual image with the drill, although it could be construed that way." — Brian De Palma, Cinephilia & Beyond
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.
"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)
Kael, who had championed De Palma through Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, was harsher:
"He stages the big scenes mechanically, without the zest that used to send them off." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1984)
De Palma has consistently refused to adjudicate between the two readings — a refusal that is itself the film's position.