As we learned last October, Southbound and XX director Roxanne Benjamin had been hired by Orion to write the script for a remake of the 1984 horror-comedy Night of the Comet and today brings an update from Benjamin herself, who let's us know she's finished the script.
Speaking with MovieWeb, Benjamin said, “I actually turned it in already. It’s already done. I like making girl buddy movies. I’m really drawn to female relationships and the complexity of female relationships, and how they change. And how their interactions can be both; we’re like terrible to each other and then we’re loving to each other at the same time. I don’t know. It’s very complex, female relationships throughout your life. So that’s just fascinating to me, in terms of how that works within a horror or genre setting, and I don’t feel like we get that much out of our genre.”
She continued, “It’s always, it’s the trope. It’s the final girl. It’s one girl on her own. Obviously [Body at Brighton Rock] has one girl, so I can’t knock those kinds of movies, but that relationship in a scenario of the end of the world is fascinating to me. And I love the movie, the first movie. There’s so many great one-liners in that movie. The visuals are amazing and for a B horror movie of the time…I’m always shocked when people don’t know about it, or haven’t heard of it. It’s very confusing to me because it’s like you said you’d never heard of Weekend at Bernie’s or something. I mean, most people have heard of that, right? It’s not just me. I’m very excited about the prospect of that becoming a real thing.”
Benjamin also adds that she'd love to direct the film but that's up to Orion.
The original film, directed by Thom Eberhardt, followed sisters Regina (Catherine Mary Stewart) and Samantha Belmont (Kelli Maroney) facing off against cannibal zombies after a comet wipes out most of life on Earth.