“Nymhpos!”

Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor may sound like a pretentious shlockfest, but it’s much more than that. The premise follows a journalist hellbent on winning a Pulitzer Prize award. And how is he going to do this? He’s going to feign madness and be committed to an insane asylum where a murder has taken place. Once inside he’ll just act all goofy and fit in with everyone else, right? Things start to go off-track when he mingles a little too much with the patients, and soon enough their insanity starts to rub off on him. Fuller takes it a notch higher than this though. Each patient that he becomes close with represents Fuller’s view on America, that of conformity and a rather high emphasis on success that could, literally, drive any man mad.