Is White Zombie (1932) 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 L3357 in 1932, with no renewal in the 1959 or 1960 volumes.
The original application card is scanned and readable: registration stamp L 3357, received 24 October 1932, eight reels, claimant United Artists Corporation. That fixes what is being searched for, which is the half of a negative search that usually goes missing.
Renewal fell due in the twenty-eighth year, so 1959 and 1960. We read both years’ motion picture volumes in full. The word "zombie" does not occur anywhere in either one, 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.
That the volumes are present and the scanning is good has to be shown rather than assumed. The 1960 volume carries renewals of 1932 and 1933 contemporaries including Mystery of the Wax Museum, so the section exists, the pages are legible, and an absence in them means something.
Underneath the film there is nothing live. The screenplay was original, by Garnett Weston, drawing on William Seabrook’s The Magic Island of 1929, which is itself public domain on age.
The register, as it stands
- Original registration
- L3357, received 24 October 1932, eight reels
- Claimant
- United Artists Corporation
- Renewal fell due
- 1959–1960
- 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
- Copyright Office digitized card catalog, the 1932 application card for L3357.
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, Motion Pictures 1959 (archive.org catalogofcopyrig3131213li).
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, Motion Pictures 1960 (archive.org catalogofcopyr3141213libr).
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.