Thom Eberhardt’s counter-culture classic from 1984 is a poem to doomed youth.
Driving to work, I listen to preset no. three on my car radio. A pre-recorded transition plays, “For those in the ’80s who remember going to Benetton at the Old Mall.” I turn my car off and step into the parking lot, yet the jockeys echo. The driver parked beside me is listening to the same station. I had never considered that building a “real” mall – the iconic kind that peaked amid the decade of decadence. It was now filled with university offices and a few restaurants. To reconstruct this lost landscape, the local magazine issued a call for anecdotes from residents. One woman’s comment read: “Was a teenager hanging under those fluorescents for years. If you were brown or black, you could only wander in groups of 4 or less [sic].” In a follow-up interview, she added, “It was just a place for kids during the day to hang out. Somewhere to go…”.
“Where are the kids? It’s Saturday morning; where are the goddamn kids?!” demands protagonist Reggie in Thom Eberhardt’s 1984 film, Night of the Comet. Trying to prove to her younger sister, Sam, that everyone has been turned to dust by a passing comet, Reggie’s question rattles Sam. From the girls’ point of view, a suburban Los Angeles street is fearsome, the scattered dust on the pavement forming a menacing red glow. They argue about the reality of the situation when the radio jockey catches their attention; someone out there is still alive. The sisters head to the neon-lit station, searching for the Voice, but learn the tracks are pre-recorded. There is no jockey to help them, but there is Hector, another young survivor, hiding out.
Director Eberhardt was interested in writing a film about unassuming heroines, in which Valley Girls are left to rebuild a post-apocalyptic world, expertly dodging zombies with mild comet exposure while mourning lost boyfriends. Atlantic Releasing, enjoying the successes of 1983’s Valley Girl, was eager to fund the film, despite having reservations about Eberhardt, who, inspired by the girls he spoke to when writing the script, insisted on keeping the story funny and light, and directing it himself Night of the Comet was Atlantic’s first nationwide distribution, and it found mild success before losing its theatre spot after four weeks to 2010. But, VHS sales proved profitable for the $700,000 film, and in a 2004 interview, Eberhardt recalls being surprised by how loved the film was by young audiences, before eventually going “…into a black hole in the late ’80s… I assumed it was forgotten.”
Eberhardt felt like he was just making a drive-in movie, and though he did not see much psychological weight to that until later, it’s fitting how well Night of the Comet meditates on the locations emblematic of the youth of the ’80s. We first meet Reggie during her shift at the movie theatre, and she even spends the night there, sleeping with the projectionist. When the steel walls of the booth shield her from the comet, the movies save her life. Similarly, the radio station becomes a shelter, a physical and emotional haven for the teens to decompress and work through their anxieties. Doomsday recontextualises quotidian spaces into lifelines for abandoned teenagers.
Sam roleplays as a jockey, and a mysterious call comes in. The scene switches to show researchers in a lab listening to Sam’s broadcast and planning to retrieve the trio. “From a psychological standpoint, the radio station represents a link to normalcy. I don’t think they’ll wander far as long as it’s operating,” says one of the doctors. But Night of the Comet is more interested in the teens than the scientific remarks about them, bestowing autonomy to an adolescent generation often dismissed as vapid and useless. The radio becomes the interlocutor between adults who pathologize and kids just trying their best at the end of the world.
Preset no. two, my local student-run station, is not interested in boundaries, generationally or sonically. The college kids play an eclectic range of music, including some from the era older folk claim these kids are so far removed from. Despite moving away, I kept the preset for my hometown college station too. I distinctly remember the night I found it: I was 19 and, like in Night of the Comet, it was nearly Christmas, and like Sam, who experiences terrible anxiety at the abuse of her step-mother, I had gotten into a bad fight with my mom. For Sam and me, the radio station was a spiritual balm against annihilation, when social catastrophe precedes the cosmic. If youth makes you feel helpless and hopeless, stuck at the end of time, the radio helps transcend time altogether, not through hollow nostalgia, but through aural perception.
Reggie takes Sam shopping to cheer her up, the two indulging in a fashion montage. In trying to find where the girls relocated, the same researcher reiterates his dry wisdom, “Where would adolescents with nothing to do go?” But chaos quickly descends as former stockboys attempt to kill the girls. The mall’s safety is temporary, acknowledging the complicated tension of youthful consumerism; it may be a gathering spot for kids, a place more about hanging out than spending money, but it’s also a battleground of exploitation and materialism. It’s worth noting that Hector is played by Mexican-American actor Robert Beltran, who fought to give the last man on earth, a Latino, dignity and charm, even as Reggie utters several microaggressions to him, which Hector mocks her for. Thinking back on the anecdote about my local mall’s racism, Hector not joining the girls’ shopping excursion feels poignant, as he splits off to find his family and friends in San Diego. The film lingers on Hector walking around his empty home, picking up mementos of his lost mother and sister. It’s a small gesture, yet a pointed way of expressing how Hector is an outsider to the world Reggie and Sam easily inhabit, alongside a rare display of intimacy between the old and the young.
As for the researchers, their hollow observations about teen behaviour foreshadow that they are not the good guys, just as interested in linking children to consumption, literally, draining their blood to keep themselves alive. Every adult in the film dies, and in this way, teenagers reign over a raptured Earth; the meek inherit after all. But everything crumbles in the final act, when the trio saves two children, a boy and a girl, from the scientists. The film constructs a picturesque nuclear family, and though cheeky, it undercuts the affectionate teenage tale it initially presented. These are high schoolers, not parents, and their ’80s sensibilities of juvenile fun distinguished them. The sisters’ once androgynous names are now said in full, Regina and Samantha. It’s a shame that even after Armageddon, we’re stuck with Yuppies.
Plenty of films show teenagers interacting with bygone youth hubs like movie theatres, radios, and malls, yet Night of the Comet’s apocalyptic backdrop makes it particularly ripe for discussing memory, temporality, and the disillusionment that comes with aging out of these spaces. The film reminds us that nostalgia has limitations, that even back in the “good old days,” these spaces were imperfect and teenagers were misunderstood. Instead of harnessing dread at the passing of time against each other, we should bond over how cyclical the apocalypse is, each generation experiencing its own form of doom. The mythos of the radio station shouldn’t be a tool for making soulless proclamations about our differences, but a vessel for connection between the youth of the past and the youth of today, because music and conversation allow us to overcome our corporeality and free ourselves from the static. The definition of a “teenage comet zombie” has shifted; still, it may be that sincere correspondence includes stepping into the parking lot and recognising when someone is tuned into the same frequency you are.
