Image: still from Shock Room with actor Simon London.
Shock Room breaks open Stanley Milgram’s dramatic infamous 1960s ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiment and forces us to re-evaluate its conclusions. In the wake of the Holocaust, Milgram wanted to understand why people inflict harm on others. In 1962, he staged his experiment. Under the guise of participating in a study on memory and learning, participants were asked to inflict apparently lethal shocks on a fellow human being. Milgram later famously claimed that 65% of us will blindly follow orders.
But extensive research from Sydney filmmaker and self-professed Milgram obsessive, Kathryn Millard, reveals that Milgram ran more than 25 versions of his experiment, filming only one. And that, overall, the majority of people actually resisted.
In Shock Room, Millard contents that while Milgram’s experiment is a rich source of insights about the conditions under which people not only obey, but also resist the dictates of their consciences, that Milgram’s experiment was also as much drama as laboratory study. Milgram himself described his experiments as a fusion of art and science.
Fifty years after Milgram’s original experiments, Millard, with a team of filmmakers and psychologists, re-staged Milgram’s experiments in Sydney, Australia, with actors using director Millard’s unique immersive realism technique. Shock Room combines dramatisations, animation, archival film and interviews with psychologists Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher, providing new insights about how and why people refuse to inflict harm and the conclusions of the world’s most famous psychology experiment.
Shock Room turns a light on the dark side of human behavior and forces us to ask ourselves: what would I do?
The London screening featured a discussion with writer/director Kathryn Millard and psychologists Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher who are featured in the film.
The historian Richard Overy said about the film:
“Shock Room is essential viewing for everyone concerned with how humans behave when they are asked to obey a difficult order. It has a powerful message, skillfully communicated – above all that we have a choice whether to obey or not, and should recognise that hopeful reality.”
Writer/director Kathryn Millard’s body of work spans feature dramas, documentaries and hybrids. Her films have been selected for dozens of major festivals including Chicago, Sao Paulo, Mill Valley, Pordenone, Astra, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and have screened at Brooklyn Art Museum and on the Sundance Channel. Major credits include the feature documentary The Boot Cake (2008) the feature dramas Travelling Light (2003) and Parklands (1996) and the arts documentary Light Years (1991). Kathryn is Professor of Screen and Creative Arts at Macquarie University, Sydney.
More on the website for the film.