Is Nightmare Castle (1965) 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

Public domain — no US registration and no renewal, so the usual test says free.

The finding, and the working behind it

In copyright twice over: restored by the URAA, and a 1965 work whose renewal term was automatic anyway. The Morricone score is separately live.

This one fails two independent tests, and either is sufficient on its own.

The URAA, exactly as with Atom Age Vampire. An Italian film with Italy as its source country, released in the United States almost a year later so there is no simultaneous publication. Caiano died in 2015 and Morricone in 2020, so it was unambiguously under Italian copyright on 1 January 1996 and was restored automatically.

And the renewal test does not apply at all. Works copyrighted between 1964 and 1977 received their renewal term automatically, so the whole method of looking for a missing renewal stops working there. This is a 1965 work: even if it had been registered in the United States and nobody had ever filed anything again, it would still be in copyright. There is no version of this film that is free.

The general lesson, and the reason this record is worth reading even if you do not care about this film: ask the URAA question BEFORE the renewal question for anything not American. Two of the three failures in this research pass are foreign films, and the renewal test told us nothing useful about either.

The register, as it stands

Italian release: 16 July 1965, as Amanti d’oltretomba
US release: 5 July 1966, by Allied Artists
Director: Mario Caiano, died 2015
Score: Ennio Morricone, died 2020
US copyright runs to: the end of 2060, 95 years from 1965
Searched: 2026-09-01

The score is a separate copyright, and it outlives the argument

Ennio Morricone wrote it and died in 2020, and the music is a live copyright in its own right, independent of the film, and will be for decades. Of everything examined across both research passes, this is the title we are least able to touch.

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

The URAA, 17 U.S.C. §104A, on restoration of copyright in foreign works.
Copyright Act of 1976 §304, on the automatic renewal term for works copyrighted 1964–1977.

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.