now imagines himself a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and stirs up the patients with white nationalist dogma. The third and final witness is Boden, an atomic scientist scarred by the knowledge of the devastating power of intercontinental ballistic missiles. He has regressed to the mentality of a six-year-old child. After a hospital riot, Barrett is straitjacketed and subjected to shock treatment, and comes to believe Cathy is truly his sister, rejecting her when she comes to visit. He experiences many other symptoms of mental breakdown while he learns the identity of the killer - Wilkes, a hospital attendant who committed the murder to cover up his sexual liaisons with numerous female patients. Johnny confronts Wilkes in the hydrotherapy room, and begins a violent altercation with him, eventually extracting a confession in front of witnesses. Wilkes is apprehended, and Johnny is finally able to write his story on Sloan's murder, but the ordeal leaves him with a shattered psyche, and he is diagnosed with schizophrenia. Some time later, Cathy visits Johnny in the hospital. She laments to a psychologist about Johnny's mental decline, as Johnny sits idly in a catatonic state. Cast Production Constance Towers was asked by Samuel Fuller to be in the film during dinner at Fuller's house. Release It has been released by the Criterion Collection on different formats, starting with LaserDisc. Reception On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 94% based on , with a weighted average rating of 7.86/10. Author and film critic Leonard Maltin awarded the film three out of a possible four stars, calling it a "[p]owerful melodrama with raw, emotional impact." Andrew Sarris praised the film as “…an allegory of America today, not so much surreal as subreal in its hallucinatory view of history which can only be perceived beneath a littered surface of plot intrigue… a distinguished addition to that art form in which Hollywood has always excelled: the Baroque B-picture.” In 1996, Shock Corridor was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Martin Scorsese's 2010 film Shutter Island is said to be influenced by this film. Novelization Concurrent with the release of the film in 1963, Belmont Books released a novelization of the screenplay, written by one of the era's most popular and distinctive paperback pulpsmiths, Michael Avallone. Fuller wanted to