5 Public-Domain Sci-Fi and Horror Films You Can Legally Watch Tonight

Copyright terms weren't always this long. A batch of genuinely great early sci-fi and horror is free for anyone to watch, mostly because the copyrights expired, and in one case because of a paperwork slip. Anything made before 1931 is by now indisputably in the US public domain, and four of these five are that old. All five are free to watch, legally, right now.

1. Metropolis (1927) — Fritz Lang's towering silent-era vision of a divided city. Our spotlight has the full story of how it was nearly lost.

2. Nosferatu (1922) — F.W. Murnau's unauthorized Dracula adaptation, made without permission from Bram Stoker's estate (Count Dracula became Count Orlok). Stoker's widow Florence sued, and a court ordered every print destroyed, but several survived, and its copyright has since expired: the film entered the public domain worldwide in 2019.

3. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) — German Expressionism's founding text: warped sets, jagged shadows painted directly onto the walls, and one of cinema's earliest unreliable-narrator twists.

4. Night of the Living Dead (1968) — George Romero's zombie template entered the public domain almost by accident: the distributor forgot to include a copyright notice on the release prints, which was enough to void copyright under the law at the time.

5. A Trip to the Moon (1902) — Georges Méliès's short fantasy, inspired by Jules Verne's novels, in which a capsule shot from a cannon lands in the eye of the Moon's face. That image is one of the most frequently referenced in cinema, and at well over a century old, the film is about as safely public domain as a film can be.

All five have copies on the Internet Archive's public domain film collection, downloadable, no account required.