Is House on Haunted Hill (1959) public domain?
It is on every public domain list on the internet. The copyright record says otherwise, and here is the number.
Not public domain in the United States
What is usually said
Almost every public domain list on the internet carries this film, on the strength of a story that William Castle never renewed the copyright.
The finding, and the working behind it
Not public domain: renewed as RE0000318809 on 12 January 1986, in copyright to 2054.
The renewal exists and is on the public record. It was registered on 12 January 1986, inside the window that fell due for a film first registered in December 1958, and it names the original registration it renews.
The reason nobody finds it is a single word. The Copyright Office cataloged the film as "House on a haunted hill", with an article the film itself does not have. An exact-title search for the name on the poster returns nothing, and returning nothing is evidently what every list quoting this film has done. The way to find it is to search the renewal class on one strong keyword, "haunted", and read the whole result set rather than trusting a title match.
The song is separately renewed as well: RE0000309723, 17 November 1986, words by Richard Kayne and music by Richard Loring, renewing EU0000546955. That is a second live copyright inside the same picture.
The register, as it stands
- Original registration
- LP0000012531, 29 December 1958 (notice date 1959), Allied Artists
- Renewal
- RE0000318809, registered 12 January 1986
- Renewal claimant
- Revival Pictures, as proprietor of a work made for hire
- Filed under the title
- House on a haunted hill. By Allied Artists Pictures Corporation
- US copyright runs to
- the end of 2054
- Searched
- 2026-09-01
The one thing that can be said against this
The renewal was filed by Revival Pictures, not by Allied Artists and not by Castle. A renewal claim made by a later party is the kind of thing that can be attacked, and we are not in a position to say whether the chain of title behind it holds up.
But that is an argument about who owns the copyright, not about whether one exists. A facially valid renewal registration sits on the public record, and that is a very long way from the "never renewed" repeated everywhere. This is not a film to publish on the strength of a wiki.
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.
Where these numbers came from
- Copyright Office public catalog, renewal registration RE0000318809.
- Copyright Office public catalog, original registration LP0000012531.
- Copyright Office public catalog, song renewal RE0000309723.
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 renewal registration on the public record is evidence that a copyright was claimed, not a judgment that the claim is good. Who holds it, and whether the chain of title behind it stands up, are separate questions we are not in a position to answer. What we can say is that the record is not empty, and every list describing this film as free is asserting that it is.
This is a record of research and not legal advice. If you hold a right in this film, or you think we have read the record wrong, write to mike@tapeterritory.com with what we missed and we will correct it here.
What we do about it
We do not publish this film and we do not link to a copy of it. It is on our blocked list by name rather than by upload, because the same title reappears under a dozen identifiers and blocking identifiers would be an endless game.
Writing this down costs us a film people search for, which is rather the point. Everything else in this section is a film we did clear, researched the same way by the same person, and a record that only ever says yes would not be worth reading.
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.