Welcome to Public Domain Theater, your home for the wonderful world of films that have (in the United States, at least) fallen into the public domain, and are free for everyone to see!

Mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa!

Public Domain Theater is supposed to go up the first Saturday of every month, but with one thing and another, it plum slipped my mind last week. And this wasn’t just any Public Domain Theater, but the one meant to kick off spooky season!

Still, with twenty-one days till Halloween, there’s plenty of time to conjure up spooks and spirits for our delight. And I hope you’ll find this month’s offerings a suitably Halloweeny diversion.

Our feature film is the 1925 horror-comedy The Monster, where a trio of young lovebirds stumble into an abandoned insane asylum, now under the control of a mad scientist, played by that Man of a Thousand Faces, Lon Chaney, Sr.

What follows is a mixture of spooky happenings in an old dark house, and the sort of manic, elaborately staged slapstick we’ve come to expect from classic Silent Era comedies. Watching our heroes bungle their way through trap doors and secret passages, monsters and mad science experiments … well, it makes for a jolly good time.

Our opening cartoon is also a horror/comedy hybrid, “Swing You Sinners!” It starts off with the surreal slapstick you’d expect from an early Fleischer Studios cartoon (which can actually be unnerving in its own right). But once the action moves to the graveyard, with all the spirits of the dead rising to chastise poor Bimbo, it becomes a demented carousel of freaky delights.

So if you’re in the mood to laugh or scream this October, we’ve got just what the mad doctor ordered here on Public Domain Theater.

Opening Cartoon:

Feature Presentation: