Film / Blow Out

Blow Out is a 1981 thriller directed by Brian De Palma and starring John Travolta, Nancy Allen and John Lithgow.

Travolta plays Jack Terry, a sound technician for a low-budget exploitation film, who is told to find a more realistic scream for a slasher victim. One night, he's out in the woods by a road, recording general sound effects. A car comes down the road, there's an explosion, and it goes off the side of the road and into the water. Jack rushes to the water and jumps in. He discovers a man dead in the car and a woman named Sally (Allen) trying to get out. Eventually, Jack is able to break a window in the car and pull Sally out to safety.

At the hospital, Jack discovers the man in the car was Governor McRyan, a possible presidential candidate. Lawrence Henry, McRyan's chief adviser, tells Jack not to tell anyone else about Sally being in the car. Jack is okay with that, at first. He's less okay with the fact Henry and the police seem content with the explanation McRyan's tire simply blew out. Jack is sure he recorded the tire being shot out right before the car went over the water. What he doesn't know is the man who shot out the tire, Burke (Lithgow), who was working on behalf of others to stop McRyan, is now out to get both Jack and Sally.

Quentin Tarantino, no less, has called this De Palma's best film and one of his three favorite films. See also Blow Up, the inspiration for this film.

Not to be confused with a sci-fi video game.

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This film features the tropes:

• All for Nothing: By the time Jack comes to the rescue and kills Burke, he has already disposed of the tapes and killed Sally.
• As You Know: Early on, Jack's director asks him how long they have been working together and then Jack lists all their movies for the audience to learn that they have a history together in making cheap Slasher Movies.
• Attempted Rape: Manny Karp tries to force himself on Sally when she comes to collect his original film, forcing her to shatter a bottle over his head to defend herself.
• The Bad Guy Wins: At the end of the film, Jack has survived; however, Sally has been killed and the villains have recovered the original tape which proved that the accident Jack taped at the beginning of the film was, in fact, an assassination. He's left with only the dark Brick Joke of finally getting the scream his producer wanted for the movie.
  • Doubled down on when Jack kills Burke at the film's climax, only to find out Sally has herself already been killed. This is taken as her killing the serial killer Burke has been making his killings appear to have been done by throughout the movie, meaning that a bad guy who wasn't even in the movie has also gotten away, at least for now.
    • That is, if that serial killer ever existed separate from Burke. There is no mention of the killings until Burke commits the construction site murder, and the way he looks up repeatedly at a sign with the Liberty Bell strongly implies he is devising a Calling Card for his fictional serial killer persona.
• Be All My Sins Remembered: The final scene makes it pretty clear that Jack added Sally's dying scream to the slasher film in order to self-flagellate himself for the act of not saving her.
• Better to Kill Than Frighten: Burke was given the assignment to remove Governor McRyan from the race. What his employers wished was for Burke to blackmail the Governor by catching him in flagrante delicto with a prostitute. Burke decided instead to assassinate McRyan. He later even has the gall to tell his employers that the decision to murder him was within "the parameters" of what he was ordered. All of the murder and mayhem that follows happens because Burke decides to make sure the assignment is completely thorough.
• Big Bad: Burke was hired to "remove" McRyan from the presidential race, which he interpreted as an order to assassinate him. When Jack and Nancy end up escaping the scene with incriminating information, he makes it his personal mission to eliminate them as loose ends, even after his original employers have completely severed ties with him.
• Blackmail: It's why Sally was in the car and Manny was taking photographs; to blackmail McRyan into dropping out of the race. Of course, Burke had other plans...
• Book Ends: The film begins and ends in the editing room of the exploitation film Jack was working on.
• Brick Joke: A pretty dark one. At the beginning of the film, Jack is trying to record a good scream for the film-within-a-film. He ends up using Sally's dying scream.
• Cacophony Cover Up: Sally's murder is covered up by fireworks.
• Camping a Crapper: Burke kills a hooker who brushes her teeth in a bathroom stall.
• Coincidental Broadcast: The news on Jack's TV early on reveals details about the to-be-killed candidate and mentions the upcoming Liberty Day celebrations.
• Complexity Addiction: Burke could have saved himself a lot of extra work by just going with the original plan of getting blackmail photos of McRyan. On top of necessitating an entire cover-up that he receives no assistance for from his original clients, he decides part of this cover-up should include committing an additional series of serial murders so it looks like Sally was an unrelated victim of a Serial Killer with a specific type. Justified as Burke clearly enjoys killing for its own sake.
• Conspicuous Gloves / Conspicuous Trenchcoat: Burke features both assessors when following the hooker to the train station bathroom.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Everyone (except Donahue, the TV reporter) dismisses Jack as this; even Sally (at first), when she of all people has reason to believe him.
• Cut Phone Lines: Burke disconnects Jack's phone so Frank Donahue can't call him back, allowing Burke to take his place in a meeting with Sally.
• Disposable Sex Worker: Among the women who resemble Sally that Burke kills to make his eventual attempt on her life less suspicious is a prostitute in a subway station.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The plot takes elements of several real-life political scandals, including Chappaquiddick, JFK's assassination (specifically the conspiracy theories revolving around a police bike's dictabelt recording of the assassination) and Watergate.
• Downer Ending: Jack manages to kill the assassin, but Sally is also killed. Ironically, as a result, the cover-up is a success. Making it worse is that Sally's dying screams are perfect for the terrible slasher movie Jack is working on. The final shot is of Jack cringing in the studio as the screams haunt him over and over.
• Dragon with an Agenda: Burke is just a hired contractor, but he's one who goes far beyond what his employers wanted him to do and keeps up his plan (which involves killing Sally) even after they cut him loose.
• Even Evil Has Standards: The conspiracy that hired Burke wants absolutely nothing more to do with him after he kills McRyan, partially because his job is done, partially because they got sick with his psychotic tactics and they only wanted to Blackmail McRyan. Even then, Burke decides to clean up loose ends...
• Exact Words: Burke's Establishing Character Moment is him contacting the people who hired him after he's killed McRyan. They are foaming at the mouth for such an action and he tells them back that he was hired to "take (McRyan) out of the race", and killing him was "within the parameters of the order".
• Failure Hero: Poor Jack, at the end he achieves nothing except the banal task of finding a scream sound effect recorded during Sally's death for a Slasher Movie he was working on.
• Fanservice: Co-Ed Frenzy, the trashy Slasher Movie featured in the opening sequence, features quite a lot of gratuitous nudity from the titular co-eds as the Serial Killer stalks through their dorm.
• Futile Hand Reach: During the climax, Sally reaches out into the air with a loud scream of terror just before getting pulled back and slashed by Burke.
• Gadget Watches: Burkre's watch has a garrote. Several women get to meet it the hard way.
• Government Conspiracy: Zigzagged. Someone wanted to torpedo the McRyan presidential bid. But only with a dirty scandal story. Burke who is clearly out of mind carries out an assassination instead, muddying the waters. Burkes handlers then wash their hands of him.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Burke's original employers, heavily implied to include the incumbent President of the United States, who was getting washed in the polls by McRyan prior to the assassination.
• Grievous Bottley Harm: Sally smashes a beer bottle over a drunken Manny Karp's head when he tries to forcefully kiss her, knocking him out cold.
• Hell Is That Noise: Sally's dying scream, for Jack.
• Heroic BSoD: Jack is going to be haunted by Sally's screams forever. And no one else will know...
• Hero with Bad Publicity: The cops resent Jack due to his cooperation with an Internal Affairs investigation and won't give him the time of day.
• Hidden Wire: Jack placed this on an undercover cop, which ultimately failed when the cop's frequent sweating shorted out the battery. This led to his cover being blown, followed by his death.
• If I Had a Nickel...: When Jack tries to explain to Mackey, a police detective, how he thinks the governor was killed, Mackey dismisses Jack as just another Conspiracy Theorist, and says if he had a nickel for all of the conspiracy nuts he had heard from after the governor's death, he could buy Florida and move there.
• Karma Houdini:
  • The people who hired Burke are never captured or even suspected. On their (feeble) defense, they invoke Even Evil Has Standards on Burke and cut him loose early in the film.
  • Manny Karp, who got Sally into the whole mess, doesn't seem too broken up about risking her life and has no apparent remorse for McRyan's death, is also left alone by Burke specifically because these slimy traits keep him from posing any further threat that he'll confess the truth to anyone. Subverted when Sally brains him with a liquor bottle to stop him from raping her, which is implied to kill or at least cripple him.
• Mobstacle Course: Jack has to work his way through a crowd of people at the parade.
• My Greatest Failure: Jack tells Sally why the cops don't trust him: Jack once helped set up an undercover cop for a wire, but the cop's constant sweating shorted out the battery and exposed him, which led to the cop's execution and his teammates blaming Jack for the screw-up. By the end of the movie Jack has an even nastier failure haunting him for the rest of his life...
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Jack's scheme to lure Burke results in Sally's death, the loss of the film, and Jack killing Burke, tying up all the loose ends for those who had McRyan murdered.
• The Oner: There are a few of these, including the entire Slasher Movie sequence, and a continuous, panoramic view of Jack's studio as he discovers that his tapes have been erased.
• Phallic Weapon: The ice pick of the original Serial Killer could be seen as one.
• Police Are Useless: The cops are worse than useless in this film. The detective in charge of the case declares the car crash an accident before even conducting a proper investigation and acts extremely hostile when Jack simply asks him to do his job and consider the evidence he's bringing to him. It's implied he's later complicit in Burke erasing the tape, assuming he didn't do it himself.
• Pop the Tires: Burke causes the car accident by shooting one of the tires. Later he sneaks into the garage that keeps McRyan's car and replaces the tire with the holes that clearly indicate a gunshot with a less suspicious punctured tire to Make It Look Like an Accident.
• Proscenium Reveal: The film begins with a first-person view of a Serial Killer prowling a co-ed dorm filled with all sorts of sleaze. Then he opens the shower curtain on a victim who lets out a completely unconvincing scream. Cut to Jack and his B-Movie producer laughing at, and then arguing over the scream in the Slasher Movie whose rough cut they have just been watching.
• Psycho for Hire: Burke. He quite enjoys the murders he commits.
• "Psycho" Shower Murder Parody: The shower murder in the opening scene.
• Rewind, Replay, Repeat: Jack does this in his studio so he can sync the audio he recorded of the crash with Karp's photos of the same. In the last scene, the producer of Co-Ed Frenzy also does it to hear again and again the scream Jack got for him not knowing that it's a woman's real dying screams.
• Riddle for the Ages: It's never revealed who hired Burke to discredit/kill McRyan; The rival party's candidate, or someone else after the nomination within McRyan's own party.
• Running Gag: The producer of Co-Ed Frenzy hounds Jack throughout the film looking how they're gonna fix the issue about needing to edit in a good scream into the opening scene. If he knew where Jack got the scream he placed in his film and spends the epilogue rewinding over and over with glee, he would be a lot less happy about it.
• Serial Killer: Played with; Burke pretends to be one so his eventual murder of Sally won't be as suspicious, but he is heavily implied to be a sociopath anyway.
• Serial Killings, Specific Target: As mentioned above, Burke plots to kill Sally, the last witness, but doesn't want to make her murder look suspicious. He begins targeting women who look like her in the hope that, when he finally does get around to killing Sally, she'll be dismissed as just another victim of the lone psycho. That's exactly how it ends up playing out.
• Shadow Discretion Shot: The murder of the Disposable Sex Worker at the construction site is shown with shadows on a wall.
• Sheep in Sheep's Clothing: Well-dressed, smiling, popular talk-show Host Frank Donahue approaches Jack, tells him that he believes his claims, and offers to assist him in publicizing his evidence. In most stories, Donahue would either be The Mole for The Conspiracy, or out to steal the credit for Jack's discovery for himself, but here, he's neither, with his plot relevance coming from Burke deciding to impersonate him to lure Sally to a meeting.
• Show Within a Show: Co-Ed Frenzy, the sleazy Slasher Movie Jack is working on, which we see an excerpt of in the beginning.
• Sinister Subway: Burke tries to kill Sally in a dark spot in the subways.
• Snow Means Death: The final scene shows Jack sitting outside in the snow listening to Sally's last recording.
• Split-Screen Phone Call: There is one between Jack and Sally when he tries to convince her to talk to the news anchor.
• Spock Speak: When Burke isn't impersonating anybody, he speaks using very dispassionate and technical terms.
• Spotting the Thread: Jack can't shake the feeling he heard something wrong about the supposed tire blow out he witnessed. He keeps playing the sound recording over and over until he realizes the "pop" happens before the car swerved, and he recognizes that "pop" as a rifle shot...
• Stylistic Suck: Co-Ed Frenzy is made to be as trashy and cheesy as possible, in a deliberate Take That! to Halloween. A significant subplot of the film involves Jack trying to track down a good scream to dub over one of the actress's death screams because the original take was unusably bad.
• Swiss-Cheese Security: Burke faces no obstacle when sneaking into the garage where the sunken car from the high-profile murder case is stored.
• Take That!: The horror film Jack is working on, and which we see at the beginning, is De Palma's slam at slasher films; ironic, since critics lumped his previous film, Dressed To Kill, in with other slasher films.
• Tap on the Head: When Manny tries to force himself on Sally, Sally hits him over the head with a wine bottle, which not only knocks him out, but allows her to get Manny's film of the governor's murder.
• This Just In!: The news broadcast early on gets interrupted for a live report from Frank Donahue.
• Thwarted Coup de Grâce: Subverted. It looks like Jack is right on time to prevent the ice pick murder of Sally but it turns out she had already been killed.
• Trapped in a Sinking Car: Sally is this after the crash, and Jack dives in to save her.
• Troubled Backstory Flashback: Jack used to work for the police department until he wired an undercover cop whose cover was blown - the cop was sweating so much it shorted the wire, and he was found out - and the cop was killed as a result. We see the story play out as he tells it to Sally.
  • Also counts as Foreshadowing; he wires Sally for her meeting with whom she thinks is Donahue, and although things don't go exactly the same, they end up just as badly.
• Visual Title Drop: Played with. Jack's sound production company "Personal Effects" (as identified by the lettering on the door) was the film's Working Title.
• Worst News Judgment Ever: The newspaper with the photo footage of the accident features pages with frame-by-frame still images which would be boring to the readers but help Jack stitch together a film sequence.

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