With the help of his girlfriend Cathy and Dr. Fong, a psychiatrist, ambitious journalist Johnny Barrett poses as a madman in order to be admitted to a mental institution where a bloody murder has been committed.
Direction
Fuller's crude, expressionist asylum—beauty and ugliness colliding.
Cinematography
Surreal color inserts that blast through the black-and-white nightmare.
Acting
Peter Breck's unraveling—method acting before it was cool.
Director
Samuel Fuller
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Fuller shot in an actual abandoned mental hospital with real former patients as extras.
The film's lurid asylum imagery directly inspired 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' and countless horror descendants.
US
