Chelsea Spear
We just go nuts at Christmastime, as Reggie and Sam Belmont can tell you. The sisters at the heart of the sci-fi coming of age movie Night of the Comet are beset by holiday stressors like family drama and long hours in a customer-service job, with an existential crisis on the horizon: a comet that was last visible when the dinosaurs went extinct is making a once-in-several-million-years appearance over Los Angeles in the days leading up to Christmas.
The girls spend the night protected from the comet, and when they wake up the next morning, they find that many of the problems from the previous night—like Sam’s humiliating movie theatre job and the girls’ philandering stepmother—have turned to dust in the wake of the planetary activities. The poisonous red skies and desolate streets of Downtown L.A. have a sobering effect on Reggie and Sam, but their resilience and acidic sense of humor pushes them to find other comet survivors. The girls eventually create a found family from others who survived the comet, a pragmatic but ultimately hopeful message for other misfit teenagers toughing out the holiday season.
“I just decided that putting Valley girls at the end of the world would be a really weird mixture,” director Thom Eberhardt said in a 2013 director’s commentary. A one-time documentary director for PBS, Eberhardt had worked with kids on camera. While the premise of Night of the Comet bordered on the outlandish, Eberhardt’s ability to listen and relate to teenagers came through in the sisters’ more vulnerable moments, as in Sam’s monologue about her crush on a boy who’d been turned to dust. “Kelli threw herself into the speech even though it was totally preposterous,” Eberhardt told a Night of the Comet fan page in 2004. “I kind of felt bad for her because the speech was so loony-tunes, it always got snickers and even laughs when we screened for various adults, including critics. However, when I sat with my wife at the mall, watching it with a bunch of kids, I was stunned to hear weeping. I looked behind me and saw these two 12-year-old girls wiping away tears. Dead boyfriends? It’s an aspect of the end of the world they had not considered.”
The feelings of desolation in Sam’s monologue extend to the film’s cinematography and production design. Though Night of the Comet begins ten days before Christmas, the holiday season is only glancingly mentioned in dialogue. As the girls walk through Downtown L.A., stray holiday decor appears in the background and snippets of Christmasy music weave through the score, adding to the eeriness of how empty the neighborhood is. Seeing a Christmas tree and a tinsel garland at the edges of a department store where the girls try to forget their troubles—just before being kidnapped by a trio of comet zombies—underscores how young our protagonists are and how lonely they must feel at the most wonderful time of the year.
Eberhardt had written the script in the early 1980s, when movies that depicted the burgeoning punk subculture were released to critical acclaim and cultish fanbases. Apart from a supporting cast that included Dick Rude of Repo Man and Warhol superstar Mary Woronov, Night of the Comet didn’t have much in common with higher-profile features like Repo Man, but the film’s irreverent sense of humor and complicated female protagonists gave it an edge that would appeal to KROQ listeners and the audiences of nightclubs like Whisky A Go Go. Atlantic Releasing produced, with a $700,000 budget, and assigned Valley Girl producers Wayne Crawford and Andrew Lane to the project. Given the empathetic female perspective and irreverent screenplay for Valley Girl, Crawford and Lane seem like the ideal producers for a film like Night of the Comet, but after the critical and commercial success of their previous project, the pair were “a little more than ticked off” about working on a small science-fiction movie. “[They] told me they thought it sucked and had another director waiting to take my place when, as they hoped, the production company fired my ass,” Eberhardt recalled in 2004, before conceding that “those guys…(probably) ended up with fond memories.”
Night of the Comet opened to mixed reviews and would eventually make $15 million at the box office. Like many 1980s cult movies, however, it found its most dedicated audience through video rentals and frequent broadcasts on basic cable. The mix of comedy and sci-fi, which Eberhardt thought made the film a hard sell, give it a fresher feeling than many of the more straightforward sci-fi and horror movies of the era, and Kelly Maroney’s naturalistic portrayal of the plucky, mouthy cheerleader Sam would go on to inspire the character of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Many viewers are feeling a bit distant from the holiday season in 2024, as a new presidential administration is set to enact drastic changes to the American lifestyle. Night of the Comet, with its resourceful, bleakly funny female protagonists, its depiction of found families, and its balance of cartoonish humor and a poignant sense of what the characters have lost, might be the ideal holiday film for those feeling left out in the cold this December.
“Night of the Comet” is streaming on Hoopla, Pluto TV, and MGM+.
