The weeks leading up to Christmas are a time for us to indulge in all of our occasion-appropriate pop culture favorites, whether it’s your annual family rewatch of It’s a Wonderful Life or the regular argument over whether Die Hard counts as a Christmas movie. There are also plenty of underseen holiday movies that will bring a sparkle to your time off in between turkey sandwiches, and one such film, which influenced the creation of one of sci-fi’s greatest heroines, is celebrating its 40th birthday today.
1984's Night of the Comet follows Regina "Reggie" Belmont, a bored teen working at a movie theater whose main concerns in life are hanging out with her projectionist boyfriend Larry and getting the high score on the local Tempest arcade cabinet. Her younger sister, Sam, has fallen out with her stepmother and spends the night sleeping in the steel shed in the backyard. Then things escalate a little further when Earth passes through the tail of a comet and almost everyone on the planet dies. The few survivors are Reggie, Sam, a man named Hector, and some murderous zombies. Yes, it’s a Christmas movie.
The film is an impeccable slice of '80s nerd cool. Written and directed by Thom Eberhardt, it was intended to blend the filmmaker's love of post-apocalyptic movies and the sparky heroines of Golden Age Hollywood. While working on TV specials for PBS, Eberhardt asked teenage girls how they would act if they found themselves amid the apocalypse. They imagined it as exciting, like an adventure, and Eberhardt decided to blend that with markers of the decade.
The film's distributor wanted to capitalize on drive-in favorites of the era like Valley Girl and Repo Man, and Night of the Comet feels like the midpoint between them. The B-movie homages are obvious, with the apocalyptic event sharing similarities to the one in The Day of the Triffids. Perhaps the most evident cinematic sibling, however, is George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, another zombie movie where the survivors hide in a mall.
While Romero’s classic is scathing in its indictment of how capitalism creates brain rot in us all, Night of the Comet is cheekier but no less pointed. Reggie and Sam have a blast playing around in the mall, complete with an indelibly ‘80s montage set to Cyndi Lauper, but it’s still a place where you can buy machine guns and designer shoes on the same floor. When her gun jams during target practice, Sam quips, "See, this is the problem with these things. Daddy would have gotten us Uzis." Who cares about the end of the world and everything you love when there’s shopping to do?
Reggie and Sam, played by Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney, are no mere valley girls. Sure, they like to shop, flirt, and have very big hair, but they're not helpless damsels. They equip themselves well for an end-of-the-world battle, showing themselves capable of survival without losing their sardonic edge or femininity. They outsmart all kinds of dudes, living or otherwise. When presented with the worst-case scenario, they are remarkably matter-of-fact in a way that makes you hope the actual end times have leaders this savvy.
While we never got a Night of the Comet sequel, it left behind a significant legacy. In the early '90s, Joss Whedon was working on a movie script about a young woman forced into killer circumstances. In a 2003 interview with IGN, he said, "I would like to make a movie that was one of these crappy, low-budget movies, that like the Romero films, had a feminist agenda, had females in it who were people, and had all the fun, all the silliness." One of his inspirations? Night of the Comet, a movie with a cheerleader who kicks ass and has no time for monsters and their nonsense. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was born, and the rest is history.
Even if Buffy Summers had never started staking vampires in Sunnydale, Night of the Comet would stand tall as a vibrant, sharp-witted sci-fi horror comedy that let young women be heroes on their own terms. It’s still depressingly commonplace for “strong female characters” to either be stripped of their femininity or leered at by the camera. Reggie and Sam shot down expectations with Daddy’s credit card and a shotgun, and the comet zombies rued the day they tried to take down their mall. What more could you ask for with your next Christmas movie?
