Is White Zombie 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

Registered L3357, received 24 October 1932, eight reels, claimant United Artists Corporation; the original application card is scanned and readable, which fixes what is being searched for. Renewal fell due in the twenty-eighth year, 1959 and 1960. Both years' printed Catalog of Copyright Entries motion picture volumes were read in full: the word 'zombie' does not occur anywhere in either, not in the renewals and not in the new registrations. In the 1959 renewal sequence the alphabet runs straight from White Shoulders to Wicked, which is precisely where this title would sit. The volumes are present and legible: the 1960 volume carries renewals of 1932 and 1933 contemporaries including Mystery of the Wax Museum, so an absence in it means something. Neighbours renewed: LP3356 (The Soilers, Hal Roach, 17 Feb 1960, R252331) and LP3358 (renewed 17 Dec 1959); L3357 is absent. The online renewal database returns 0 renewals for 'white zombie'. Underneath the film there is nothing live: an original screenplay by Garnett Weston drawing on William Seabrook's The Magic Island (1929), itself public domain on age. Copy: the Archive's WhiteZombie upload, 720x480 MPEG-2, 66.8 minutes.

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 White Zombie on archive.org
Researched: 2026-09-25
What we did to the print: 358 described cues across a 66 minute 47 second runtime, filling 29 minutes 7 seconds of gaps between dialogue -- 43.6 percent of the film -- at 171 words per minute.; Figures measured from the shipped sidecar and the shipped master.; The original soundtrack was repaired from the Archive copy: rumble filtered below 60 Hz, the top end rolled off above 6 kHz, loudness matched in two passes. No picture restoration on this pass.; Described track flagged default and visual_impaired, with the original audio kept as a separate selectable stream.

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 [email protected] and we will take it down while we check.

Watch it

White Zombie 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.