Hero Worship: Brian De Palma

It’s sometime in the early 90s. I’m snuggled under my He-Man duvet covers scouring late night TV for a movie to quench my healthy preteen obsessions with sex and horror when I settle on a tantalising scene. A girls’ locker room. The camera tracks in slow motion. Naked nymphs with nether regions like small woodland creatures frolic in a fine mist emanating from the showers. The name Carrie appears on screen in blood red, a colour I’d be seeing more of over the next 90 minutes. I’d fallen in love, not with the film's naughty antagonist Nancy Allen (that was purely lust) but with its director, Brian De Palma, and his baroque brilliance.

It’s not easy being a De Palma-nut. Misogynist is usually the first free-associated word spat at me by haters when I bring up my love for his movies — a bizarre reaction I find, especially considering that his best movies (Sisters, The Fury, Dressed to Kill, Femme Fatale) have arse-kicking female leads. Is it better to ignore women, as most male Hollywood directors do, than to adore them?

The next slanderous accusation is plagiarism. Sure he borrows Hitchcock’s plots and themes, but I’m convinced if the rotund genius had lived to see De Palma’s 1984 masterwork Body Double, a feverish soft-porn hybrid of Vertigo and Rear Window, he would have been first in line to shake his self-appointed protégé’s hand – as soon as his erection had subsided, that is.

These hostilities are far preferable, however, to the “Oh, The Untouchables guy” response. Quoting this David Mamet scripted potboiler as your favourite De Palma is like saying Yesterday is your desert island Beatles cut. It’s this reaction that best hints at the reason De Palma never got his proper due: the cinema going public is, on the whole, a conservative bunch, and De Palma's daring style is too gloriously trashy for the art house crowd and too esoteric for the mainstream.

While his contemporaries Scorsese and Spielberg have toned down their 70s movie brat shtick as they’ve gotten older – winning Oscars in the process – De Palma’s output is still as demented as ever. Of his last three pictures, Femme Fatale, Black Dahlia and Redacted, the first two could easily slip into his late 70s purple patch and the latter (still the fiercest and finest Iraq war picture) is as much an acid-in-the-face attack on right-wing America as his 60s counterculture comedies.

Don’t go changing, big man.