was also becoming a popular genre to audiences, with the box offices successes of Dressed to Kill and Body Heat. After fighting with censorship boards over the rating of Scarface — they rated it X and he had to battle to make it R — De Palma resolved to make Body Double as pushback. At the time, he said "If this one doesn't get an X, nothing I ever do is going to. This is going to be the most erotic and surprising and thrilling movie I know how to make...I'm going to give them everything they hate and more of it than they've ever seen. They think Scarface was violent? They think my other movies were erotic? Wait until they see Body Double." Having been impressed with the horror film Blood Bride, De Palma enlisted its director and writer Robert J. Avrech to write the Body Double script with him. Both were fans of Alfred Hitchcock, and screened Rear Window and Vertigo to gather inspiration. Avrech later described his work on the film as "working off of De Palma's ideas of Hitchcock's ideas." Casting De Palma initially wanted pornographic actress Annette Haven to play Holly, but she was rejected by the studio due to her pornographic filmography. Nonetheless, Haven did appear in a minor role and consulted with DePalma about the adult film industry. De Palma then offered the role to Linda Hamilton, who declined to begin pre-production on The Terminator. Jamie Lee Curtis, Carrie Fisher, and Tatum O'Neal were considered for the role before Griffith won the role. De Palma later said Haven "was an enormous amount of help" to him in his understanding of the adult film industry and what Holly's background might be, and Griffith brought "a comic edge that I wanted to be a major part of the tone of the second half of the movie." Griffith initially was reluctant to take the role, thinking she "didn't want any more nymphet roles, but now I think I can bring a lot of life to that kind of character...I think I gave her a great amount of intelligence." De Palma also considered Dutch erotic actress Sylvia Kristel for the role of Gloria, but she was unavailable. Although he cast Shelton, he found her voice to be unsuitable and had her lines dubbed by Helen Shaver in post-production. Body Double contains a film within a film sequence