About the name of the movie, the director Sebastián Hofmann said in an interview with Vice Mexico that when he started thinking about the story for his film, he had a childhood memory of his grandmother asking him to draw Halley's Comet.

While writing the script for the film in Yucatán, México, he was walking across a town when he saw a newspaper where he read that there was going to be a meteor shower caused by the cosmic dust trail of Halley's Comet.

For its special treatment of topics as mortality, illness and loneliness, the cinematography and the protagonist performance,[4] Halley gained positive reviews in several media.

Marc Saint-Cyr of Senses of Cinema praised the film for taking the zombie genre into an original territory with a "thoughtful, expertly composed character study".

He concluded that "while so many other filmmakers claim they want to bend or break free from overdone zombie movie conventions, Hofmann fearlessly leaves them all behind and emerges with a hauntingly relatable examination of the body, mortality and alienation.