An ambitious journalist named Johnny Barrett induces his girlfriend, Cathy, to pose as his sister and have him committed to a mental institution, so he can investigate the unsolved murder of one of the patients. Three inmates witnessed the crime: an ex-G.I. brainwashed in Korea who believes he is a Civil War general, a Black broken by the ordeal of being the first non-white to enroll at a Southern university, and a former nuclear physicist now withdrawn into infantilism. Barrett's obsession to solve the murder is rooted in an identity crisis. It begins as a means of winning a Pulitzer Prize and evolves into a search for the Self in an America gone awry. Thomas Elsaesser noted, "I think it would be wrong to see the mental hospital simply as a reflection of some of the major social problems that haunt America-Communism, racism, the atom bomb. Fuller goes deeper by showing how the conscious side of America in its drives, its values and ideals is complemented by an 'irrational' side which belongs intimately to these conscious attitudes." Barrett's slow descent into madness takes place in a dismal asylum that seems the concrete symbol of irrationalism, the corridors dotted with every species of pathology. Fuller uses a wild, maddening assortment of visual devices to depict Barrett's decline, including distorted color footage from House of Bamboo. Shock Corridor is a wonderfully weighted film in which the search for Self brings about its own little apocalypse.