1. Dionysus in '69 (1969)
A radical artifact, part avant-garde theatre doc, part proto-De Palma formal experiment. Shot in split-screen (a technique he'd revisit throughout his career), the film captures a fevered stage adaptation of The Bacchae with nudity, audience interaction, and anarchic energy. It’s not traditionally “entertaining,” but essential for understanding De Palma's roots in performance, voyeurism, and myth. Dionysus suggests that madness and ecstasy lie just beneath the surface of civilization—a theme he never drops.
2. Home Movies (1979)
A scrappy, semi-autobiographical oddity made with students at Sarah Lawrence College. It's meta, jokey, and amateurish by design—riffing on self-help culture, family dysfunction, and the mechanics of filmmaking itself. Think of it as 8½ by way of a college film workshop, with a smirking De Palma narrating his own origin story. Most notable for how it foreshadows his lifelong obsession with doppelgängers and surveillance. Also a rare chance to see Kirk Douglas chew scenery in a student film context.
3. Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
A glam-opera masterpiece and arguably De Palma’s first full-throttle auteur work. Equal parts Faust, Phantom of the Opera, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, run through a glitter-soaked rock ‘n’ roll dystopia. Paul Williams is genius as the Mephistophelean Swan. The film is pure De Palma: split-screens, tragic romanticism, pop culture paranoia, and grotesque comedy. It's a cult classic for good reason—punk before punk, cynical before Network, and visually delirious.
4. Raising Cain (1992)
One of his most psychologically unhinged thrillers, often misunderstood. Raising Cain plays like De Palma eating his own tail—obsessed with identity fragmentation, parental trauma, and Hitchcockian pastiche. John Lithgow delivers a virtuoso performance in multiple roles. At its best, it’s dreamlike and terrifying; at its worst, disjointed—but that’s part of its charm. The 2016 “director’s cut” restored the originally intended nonlinear structure, making it more coherent as a surreal nightmare.
Beyond Scarface, these films show De Palma the playwright of psychosis, the engineer of illusions, and the theater kid turned cinematic provocateur. He’s not just a mimic of Hitchcock—he’s a chaos magician, a structuralist prankster, a rock-opera romantic with a split-screen heart.
With that being said, watch and rewatch Scarface. A masterpiece.
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