Shock Corridor

(1963)

With such an exposition-forward title and concept and high-concept murder mystery hook, you would expect SHOCK CORRIDOR to have something going on beneath the surface, if for no other reason than its auteur Samuel Fuller. If anything, the film may deliver more than you even expected it to. The detective story in a mental hospital is a vehicle for some of the most provocative, no-holds-barred, and radical discussions of social and political issues in America that have ever taken place in film fiction. Our interviewing of patients who are eyewitnesses to a killing rip open the national wounds around racial integration, nuclear war, and communism without any limits or easy answers. If the depiction of mental illness seems archaic – and you suspect it wouldn’t by the standards of its day – the use of it as an interface for direct address of taboo and controversial subject matter resonates and continues to impress in a time when challenging conversations can easily be censorship even in the most liberal of work. Artistically, the film is just as revolutionary. It reinvents the stylistic norms of American independent cinema with regards to interiority in its rule-breaking representations of psychotic fantasy and film aesthetics with its combining of black-and-white dramatization and color documentary footage. Undercover journalism is depicted as a kind of madness and institutional care is perversely – but not inaccurately – shown to be a place where people are made sick with treatment rather than cured. The fragility of the human mind is given full voice.