The Killer Shrews
1959 · 68 min · Horror · Science Fiction
A supply boat calls at a private island, and a storm strands its captain overnight with the scientist who lives there and his household. The animals the scientist has been breeding have got loose. Directed by Ray Kellogg, with James Best and Ingrid Goude.
This film has an audio description track, written and recorded here, so a blind or low-vision viewer can follow it by ear. There is nothing to switch on — the description is in the film’s own sound, so pressing play is the whole of it.
We describe films like this for archives and filmmakers: see what audio description costs and audio description for independent films.
Free to watch via internet-archive.
Is The Killer Shrews public domain? The rights evidence — the copyright registration, the renewal search and the sources we checked, written out in full so you can check them too.
Watch it here
This is our restoration, with the audio description track mixed in. There is nothing to switch on: press play and the description is in the sound. It is free, there is no account, and nothing is counted.
Sound only — 135 MB rather than 883 MB. Everything the described master says, without the picture.
Or watch it with the picture:
The same film without description, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Every film here that carries audio description — what description is, who it is for, and how ours are made.
How this print was restored
This copy of The Killer Shrews was restored here, from a print that had been through a good deal before it reached us. The work finished on 2026-10-07. Every step is listed below, because a re-encode passed off as a restoration is worth nothing and the only way to tell them apart is to say what was done.
- 279 audio description cues across 68.9 minutes, none overlapping dialogue, 168 wpm.
- Coverage 23.7%, still below our 33% floor but a second writing pass on the 11 September rebuild lifted it from 18.8%.
- No picture restoration on this pass -- the video bitstream is the source, copied rather than re-encoded, so nothing here is a grade.
- Described track flagged default and visual_impaired, with the original audio kept as a separate selectable stream.
- The cuecheck picture review has NOT been run on these cues.
- Four sound cues in the caption file were confirmed by ear before being written: the boat's motor, the boat crossing, wind, and the engine at 17 minutes.
The print we started from is here, so the before and after can be compared.
More like this: Free horror movies, Free science fiction movies.