[2] 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".

[3] Bent on winning a Pulitzer Prize, ambitious journalist Johnny Barrett hopes to uncover the facts behind the unsolved murder of Sloan, an inmate at a psychiatric hospital.

Stuart's captors pronounced him insane and he was returned to the United States in a prisoner exchange, after which he received a dishonorable discharge and was publicly reviled as a traitor.

Psychologically traumatized by the abuses he suffered there, he now imagines himself a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and stirs up the patients with white nationalist dogma.

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.

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.

"[9] 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.” [10] 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".