The Bells (1926)

James Young, Lionel Barrymore, Boris Karloff, Gustav von Seyffertitz · 1926 · 73 min

An innkeeper murders a wealthy traveller for the money, gets away with it completely, and is destroyed instead by his own conscience and the sound of sleigh bells he cannot stop hearing. Lionel Barrymore carries it. The reason it turns up on horror lists is Boris Karloff, five years before Frankenstein, playing a mesmerist modelled closely on Caligari — a small part he clearly enjoys enormously.

Draft print report — replaced by the verification pipeline's output before launch. No print has been selected yet. Silent: the accompanying score is a separate rights question from the picture and must be cleared on its own — a public-domain film can arrive carrying a copyrighted modern score.

Public domain in the United States by expiry of the full copyright term: published 1926, and every work published that year entered the US public domain on January 1, 2022, at the end of the 95-year term — renewal history is moot. The picture and its accompaniment are verified separately: whatever score the chosen print carries is a separate work on its own clock, cleared at print selection and documented in the Print Report before this page ships a torrent.