Night of the Comet: The Valley-Girl Apocalypse

The Earth passes through the tail of a comet for the first time in sixty-five million years — the last object to do so having, the film cheerfully notes, coincided with the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Everyone goes outside to watch. In the morning, the people who watched are red dust on the pavement, their clothes and watches and fillings in neat little piles where they were standing.

Two survive in Los Angeles, more or less, and they are teenage sisters from the Valley. Night of the Comet is what happens when you hand the last-man-on-earth premise to people who have absolutely no intention of being solemn about it.

The premise, kept above the line

Regina Belmont (Catherine Mary Stewart) works at a cinema and spends comet night in the steel-lined projection booth with the projectionist, which is why she is alive. Her younger sister Samantha (Kelli Maroney) argued with their stepmother and slept in a steel garden shed, which is why she is alive. This is the film’s one piece of real science-fiction rigour and it is a good one: steel shielding stopped the comet dust, and the survivors are the people who happened to be inside metal.

That it also means the heroine of a film about the end of the world survived because she was in a movie theatre is the sort of joke Thom Eberhardt makes constantly and never underlines.

They come out to an empty red-skied Los Angeles, pick up Hector (Robert Beltran), a lorry driver who was asleep in the back of his cab, and discover that partial exposure produced something worse than dust — people who are still walking and are steadily desiccating into something with an appetite. Meanwhile, in a bunker in the desert, a team of scientists who sealed themselves in slightly too late are working the problem, and they have very specific ideas about what they need from anyone who came through clean.

Why the tone works

Here is the craft argument, and it is the whole film. Night of the Comet is played by its leads as though nothing especially serious has occurred, and the discipline that requires is enormous.

Reggie and Sam are not in shock and they are not making jokes at the apocalypse. They are simply teenagers, and Eberhardt’s insight is that teenagers have a functionally infinite capacity to absorb catastrophe and get on with their own concerns. Sam’s dominant emotion on learning the human race is over is irritation with a specific person. Reggie’s is competence — she is annoyed, practical, and immediately good at this, because she has spent the film’s opening beating the high score on an arcade cabinet and is fundamentally a person who finishes things.

The shopping-mall sequence is where this pays off and it is a genuinely great piece of film-making. The sisters loot an empty mall, trying on clothes to a bright cover of a pop song, and Eberhardt shoots it as pure joy — no irony, no undercutting, no melancholy strings telling you this is hollow. It is the single most honest thing in any apocalypse film I know. Of course they would. Everyone is dead and the clothes are free and they are seventeen. The film’s refusal to punish them for enjoying it is a real moral position, and it is why the sequence lands as delight instead of satire.

Then the film turns the mall on them, and because it never mocked the pleasure, the reversal actually costs something.

Cinematographer Arthur Albert does the other half of the work. Los Angeles under the comet’s residue is shot in a heavy, sourceless red that turns familiar streets into something Martian, and the trick is that the light is beautiful. There is no grime, no wreckage, no rubble. The city is immaculate and rose-coloured and completely empty, and the emptiness is far more unnerving for being pretty. Compare it with the standard post-apocalyptic vocabulary of ash and ruin and the difference is instructive: Eberhardt understood that the frightening thing about a dead world is that it looks fine.

What it is really descended from

The collector’s note is a double.

The first parent is The Day of the Triffids — John Wyndham’s novel and its 1962 film — in which a spectacular comet display draws the whole world outside to look, and the looking is what destroys them. That is Night of the Comet’s premise exactly, with the blindness swapped for disintegration. Wyndham’s cosy-catastrophe mode is the film’s real inheritance: the middle-class apocalypse where the plumbing still works, the shops are still stocked, and the survivors’ first problem is logistics and their second is each other.

The second parent is Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, which established the shopping mall as the natural cathedral of the American apocalypse, and which Eberhardt is answering rather than copying. Romero’s survivors take the mall and are hollowed out by it; his consumers are the joke. Eberhardt’s sisters take the mall and have a lovely time, and the film declines to sneer, which is a more generous and considerably more subversive position than Romero’s. The desk’s survey of how the zombie keeps changing its meaning covers the ground, and the zombie canon places Eberhardt’s desiccated near-people where they belong.

For sideways cousins: Repo Man came out the same year and is the same city — flat, funny, nuclear-hungover Los Angeles, played deadpan — and the two films together make a superb double bill about 1984 LA as a science-fiction location. Liquid Sky is the New York end of the same energy. And The Quiet Earth, a year later, runs the identical premise with total seriousness and is the best possible argument for how much tone decides.

The case against

The bunker plot is a drag. Every minute Night of the Comet spends with the scientists is a minute it is not spending with the sisters, and the scientists are written as a straightforward institutional menace — Geoffrey Lewis does what he can, and Mary Woronov, a genuine cult-cinema aristocrat, is criminally underused in a part that gives her one good decision and very little else.

The desiccated are also underdeveloped. The film establishes them, uses them in two set pieces, and then loses interest, which leaves the middle act short of a physical threat and reliant on the bunker business to generate stakes. And the effects are cheap, which mostly does not matter, except when the film asks you to be frightened.

The bigger structural complaint: the film is smarter in its first forty minutes than in its last thirty. Once it commits to a plot it becomes an ordinary picture, and what makes it extraordinary is everything that happens before anyone has anything to do.

Where it stands

It stands as one of the most purely likeable films of its decade and considerably cleverer than its reputation as a curio allows. Night of the Comet was written and shot fast and cheap by people with no expectation that anyone would still be arguing about it forty years on, and it survives because Eberhardt got one enormous thing right: he took two teenage girls and made them the competent, funny, unsentimental centre of an apocalypse, in a genre and a decade that had essentially no idea what to do with either.

Its fingerprints are everywhere downstream. Every subsequent apocalypse with a wisecracking survivor and a killer needle-drop is drinking from this well, and most of them are more expensive and less charming.

Watch it for Catherine Mary Stewart, who plays competence as a personality trait rather than a plot function. Watch it for a red, immaculate, empty Los Angeles. Watch it for the mall, and for the fact that the film lets them enjoy it.

It has had a very good disc restoration and drifts across streaming; the red skies want a decent transfer.

Spoilers below

The scientists are the monsters, which the film signals early and pays off with a genuinely nasty efficiency. Having sealed the bunker a few hours late, they are all partially exposed and slowly disintegrating, and the only thing that arrests the process is a serum drawn from the blood of the fully unexposed. So they are not rescuing survivors. They are farming them, and the radio broadcast calling the clean to come in is bait.

That is a proper science-fiction idea, and it converts the film’s institutional characters from generic villains into something more interesting: rational people, working the problem, who have arrived by pure logic at harvesting children. Nobody in the bunker is evil. They are simply correct about the arithmetic, which is worse.

Woronov’s Audrey White gets the film’s best moment out of this. Realising what the team has become and that she is dying anyway, she turns on her own people and gasses the facility, and Woronov plays it with a weary distaste that suggests she made this decision some time ago and has just been waiting for a reason. It is a small, sharp performance in a film that gave her almost nothing.

The ending is where the film’s generosity fully shows. Reggie and Sam get out, having lost the two kids they were trying to save and then having found them again, and the last stretch assembles a family out of the pieces — the sisters, Hector, two rescued children. Then rain begins to fall, washing the red dust out of the sky and the streets, and the film closes on Samantha, dressed like she is going to a party, standing at a crossing waiting for the light to change while a car full of the world’s remaining boys pulls up beside her.

It is a joke and it is also the thesis. The light changes because somebody, somewhere, kept the grid running, and the world goes on because these two absurd, capable, deeply unbothered girls decided it should. Eberhardt spent ninety minutes refusing to grieve, and the ending is the payment: the human race gets to continue on the strength of a teenager’s refusal to treat the apocalypse as more important than herself. Wyndham would have recognised it. So would anyone who has ever been seventeen.