Post-Apocalypse Now

Why don’t people realise that the sky is evil? The Day of the Triffids has a meteor shower that blinds anyone who sees it, thereby allowing man-eating plants to herald in the end of civilisation; Where have all the people gone? has solar flares that reduces nearly all humanity to white powder, while The Night of the Comet similarly has the world wiped out by a passing comet (only this time the dust is red not white).

Remember kids, the cosmos is not your friend. Run from eclipses, hide from the night and bury yourself in deep underground complexes whenever an asteroid passes by. If you don’t, you’ll end up a minor footnote in the post-apocalypse, as someone else does all the fun stuff of killing zombies or running around empty cities with fast cars and big guns. Best case scenario you’re one of the flesh-eating zombies. Worse case: you’re just a pile of powder on the floor.

Night of the Comet is an enjoyable, relatively low-budget movie aimed at a teenage market drawing on a number of stable themes of the post-apocalyptic genre, including a shopping spree in a mall (reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead), and the empty, deserted and intact cities of such films as The Omega Man, The Quiet Earth and Where have all the People Gone?

The premise is straightforward: a passing comet turns anyone exposed into little more than red dust. Consequently, nearly the entire planet is wiped out by the morning. After spending the night protected from the comet’s rays, a couple of teenage valley girl sisters (Regina and Amanda) are among the few survivors left in a deserted downtown LA. They have to contend with partially-exposed survivors who have turned into zombie-like cannibals and a group of scientists who buried themselves deep in an underground bunker.

Although the source of the apocalypse is a comet (a comet that was last seen around the time of the dinosaurs), the movie is framed within a nuclear narrative. Indeed, the effects of the comet is akin to radiation – while those directly exposed were reduced to red dust, those with a partial exposure slowly decay before eventually dying. Moreover, the scientists are wary of introducing survivors from outside in their bunker for fear that they will be exposed – that a vent was left open and they were partially exposed to the comet themselves is ironic. Significantly, Amanda and Regina were protected by steel (a projector room for Regina and a garden shed for Amanda), which serve a similar function as fall-out shelters.

Notably, the film subverts common sex and gender narratives present in other horror films of the time Whereas popular contemporary ‘slasher’ films often present sex between teenagers as a prelude to their ultimate demise at the hands of Freddie/Jason et al, Regina’s sex with a boyfriend in the projector room of a cinema actually saves her from death. Moreover, both her and her sister defy the rules imposed by their stepmother – if they had obeyed her instructions and attended her Comet party they would have died.

The portrayal of gender is also interesting in the film. While Amanda and Regina are ostensibly ‘Valley girls’, they are shown in traditional female roles as shoppers (and later, in the case of Regina a mother figure to the two children), as well as adopting roles more traditionally associated with masculinity, not least when Amanda fires a machine-gun into a car and Regina opens fire on the men in the store with a gun. While other films of the era portray women as overtly masculine (such as the gunner in Hell Comes to Frogtown) or as victims, it is significant that the female leads of Night of the Comet do not lose their feminity.

Night of the Comet is  b-movie as feminist text:  this utopian post-apocalyptic fantasy enables Amanda and Regina to transform from teenager to adult. Free from the shackles of society, they discard their ‘valley girl’ personas and are liberated as independent women.

The film concludes on an optimistic note: the elder sister takes on a maternal role after effectively adopting two children rescued from the scientists, as well as having a partner in the shape of Hector (a truck driver they meet at a radio station). In addition to this ready-made family unit, Amanda conveniently finds a potential boyfriend driving down a deserted street.

Night of the Comet doesn’t take itself too seriously but it’s a highly effective movie and far more intelligent than the Mad Max clones that seem to dominate the 80s post-apocalyptic scene.

The Postman