Is King of the Zombies (1941) public domain?
The copyright record for this film, written out in full so you can check it.
Public domain in the United States
What is usually said
Public domain, never renewed.
The finding, and the working behind it
Public domain in the United States: registered LP10469 in 1941, absent from a renewal run so dense that almost nothing else in it was skipped.
This one needed care rather than a quick search, because the Monogram library passed to Allied Artists and a good deal of it WAS renewed — the same research already found Allied Artists renewing Kansas Territory, and Revival Pictures renewing House on Haunted Hill. A missing renewal in a library nobody was working proves much less than a missing renewal in one somebody was.
The word “zombie” does not occur in the 1968 or 1969 motion picture volume, and Monogram Pictures Corp. appears only twice in either, neither time in connection with this film.
The bracket is excellent. The L104xx renewals in those two volumes are a very dense run with nearly every number present: L10461, L10462, L10463, L10465, L10466, L10467, then a gap where 10469 would be, then L10472, L10473, L10475, L10476, L10477. L10467 was renewed and L10469 was not, in a stretch where almost nothing else was skipped.
Coverage is confirmed by contemporaries: Citizen Kane and Dumbo renewals in the 1968 volume, The Maltese Falcon in the 1969 volume, all 1941 films and all present.
The register, as it stands
- Original registration
- LP10469, (C) Monogram Pictures Corp., 14 May 1941, 7 reels
- Production
- Producer Lindsley Parsons, director Jean Yarbrough
- Renewal fell due
- 1968–1969
- Renewal found
- none
- Searched
- 2026-09-01
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
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, cumulative Motion Pictures, and the Copyright Office digitized card catalog, which agree on LP10469.
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, Motion Pictures 1968 and 1969, read for the renewal run around L10469.
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.
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.
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.