With the help of his girlfriend Cathy and Dr. Fong, a psychiatrist, ambitious journalist Johnny Barrett poses as a madman in order to be admitted to a mental institution where a bloody murder has been committed.

Before becoming a filmmaker, Samuel Fuller worked as a crime reporter for the New York Evening News. His years on the beat became the basis of his career as a pulp novelist, and later as one of the most consistently innovative and provocative genre directors. 1963’s SHOCK CORRIDOR, the story of an ambitious young journalist who goes undercover in a psychiatric hospital to solve the murder of an inmate, is a turbulent culmination of Fuller’s virtuosic filmmaking. A deeply unnerving work and at times disturbing work, SHOCK CORRIDOR touches on psychoanalysis and mental illness, military PTSD, civil rights era politics and the threat of white nationalism, and the ethics of the carceral system. Fuller uses his signature sleek stylization to allow the film’s moral ambiguity to permeate. The result is a surreal pageant of the last century of social realities. -LUCY WALKER

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