Night of the Comet is a 1984 American science fiction comedy horror film written and directed by Thom Eberhardt. It stars Catherine Mary Stewart, Robert Beltran, and Kelli Maroney as survivors of a comet that has turned most people into either dust or zombies. Night of the Comet grossed $14.4 million in the US on a $700,000 budget. It has a Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 79% and has since become a cult film, influencing the creation of Buffy Summers. Plot The Earth is passing through the tail of a comet, an event which has not occurred in 65 million years and coincided with the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs. On the night of the comet's passage, eleven days before Christmas, large crowds gather outside to watch and celebrate. Eighteen-year-old Regina "Reggie" Belmont works at a movie theater in southern California. She is annoyed to find the initials DMK have the sixth highest score on the theater's Tempest video game; all the other high scores are hers. She stays after the theater closes to help her boyfriend Larry, the theatre's projectionist, sneak back in so he can loan out a film reel for illegal duplication for his own profit. He offers to pay for her assistance from what he expects to earn when the other party returns the film reel in the morning. Reggie and Larry spend the night in the steel-lined projection booth and have sex. Meanwhile, Reggie's 16-year-old sister Samantha "Sam" argues with their stepmother Doris, who Sam implies is cheating on her father, who is away on active military duty. After this escalates to a physical altercation, Sam spends the night in a steel backyard shed. The next morning, a gloomy reddish haze covers the sky, and there are no signs of life but piles of red dust and heaps of clothing everywhere. Unaware that anything has occurred, Larry goes outside and is killed by a zombie wielding a pipe wrench. After playing the video game to replace DMK's initials with her own, Reggie goes looking for Larry outside, mistaking the red overcast sky as bad smog. She quickly encounters the zombie, but escapes on Larry's motorcycle. She heads home to find her sister, and they surmise that because they both spent the night in steel containers, they were saved from the comet's effects. The sisters race to the local radio station after they hear