Is Carnival of Souls (1962) public domain?

The evidence we relied on to restore, describe and publish it — in full, so you can check it.

Rights basis on record

The finding, and the working behind it

No renewal. `renewal-check.py` returned 0 records on the distinctive words unquoted (`carnival souls`) and 0 on the exact phrase, both against registration class RE. The film was published in 1962, so its renewal fell due in 1989-1990, and the online catalog covers that whole window -- a nil result here is evidence rather than an absence of searching. The method searches the distinctive words first, then the exact phrase, and prints every hit to be read rather than counting them, because a renewal naming the studio is the film however the clerk spelled the title. THE PRINT MATTERS AS MUCH AS THE FILM. The best-looking copy on archive.org is 1472x1072 and its first twenty-one seconds are the Criterion Collection logo and the Janus Films card: it is a rip of the Criterion restoration. Carnival of Souls is public domain; Criterion's restoration of it is not, because a restoration is a separate copyrightable work and the logo is a trademark besides. That source, its transcript and its 198-sheet viewing set were deleted. The copy we describe is 640x480, opens on the drag-race scene with no distributor logo of any kind, and runs the complete 83 minute cut. Resolution we are not entitled to is worth nothing. The Internet Archive item we took the print from, `CarnivalOfSouls_201508`, states its own licence as the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 -- verified by reading the item's metadata rather than the page around it. That is the uploader's assertion and not a finding of law, which is why it is recorded beside the renewal search rather than instead of it.

How to check this yourself

Everything above is drawn from public records. None of it requires our word:

The Catalog of Copyright Entries, the Copyright Office’s printed registration and renewal volumes, scanned and searchable at the Internet Archive and at the Online Books Page. Registration numbers beginning LP or MP are film entries.
The Copyright Office online records at copyright.gov, which are complete from 1978 and therefore decisive for any renewal that fell due from then on.
The NFPF Field Guide to Sponsored Films, for the industrial and educational titles, which records copyright status entry by entry.

The copy, and what we changed

The print we started from: The source print for Carnival of Souls on archive.org
Researched: 2026-09-12
What we did to the print: 488 described cues across an 83 minute 5 second runtime, filling 32 minutes 10 seconds of gaps between dialogue -- 38.7 percent of the film -- at 175 words per minute.; That coverage sits inside the 36 to 46 percent band professional description aims for, and it is the first title of ours to reach it.; Figures measured from the shipped sidecar and the shipped master.; 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.; No caption file yet: this title ships described but not captioned.

What this does and does not mean

This is a finding about United States copyright, made in good faith from the public record. Copyright terms differ by country, and a film in the public domain here may still be protected elsewhere.

A negative search proves that no record was found, which is not identical to proving that no record exists. The Copyright Office says as much about its own catalogs. Where a search could not be decisive we say so above rather than rounding it up to certainty.

Restoring a public domain film gives nobody any new rights over the film, including us: this print is free to take, use and pass on, exactly as the original is.

The audio description is not part of that. It is an original work written and recorded by Always on Top Entertainment LLC — free to listen to here, and licensed separately for reuse. If you hold a right in this film and we have it wrong, write to mike@tapeterritory.com and we will take it down while we check.

Watch it

Carnival of Souls (1962) is free to watch here, restored and audio described, with no account and no advertising.

Why we did this research

Establishing what may be published is the first step before restoring a film and writing an audio description for it. That is what this site is for, and we do the same work on commission — audio description and captioning, with published rates.