If you’re honest with yourself, you probably weren’t all that excited about 28 Years Later when you first heard about it. After all, as entertaining as 2002’s 28 Days Later was, 2007’s 28 Weeks Later demonstrated all the signs of diminishing returns. It wasn’t as scary. It wasn’t as memorable. And it turns out that things just weren’t as interesting six months after a zombie outbreak as they were four weeks after. By rights, 28 Years Later should continue this trend. And, when it comes out, that might still prove to be the case. As of now, though, it’s just about the most exciting film of 2025. And this is entirely down to its trailer.
By now, you know the basic formula for most movie trailers. Pick any song from the last 50 years, doesn’t matter which, and record a new version of it. The first half of it should be dreamy and distant, the second punctuated with big echoey drums that cut well with the action. Just recently, the Minecraft Movie trailer did this with Magical Mystery Tour, Babygirl did it with Madison Beer’s Make You Mine and even A Complete Unknown managed to find a way to shoehorn giant drum noises into Like a Rolling Stone.
But 28 Years Later, you sense, is going to change all that. The US Navy operates something called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, a training programme designed to equip military personnel with the necessary skills to survive in hostile environments. Part of this involves detaining them in a small cell while being repeatedly played the scariest thing that staff have to hand: a 1915 recording of actor Taylor Holmes reciting the Rudyard Kipling poem Boots.
The poem itself is terrifying enough, the percussive chant of an infantryman marching towards battle, trying to overcome his grinding sense of impending doom. But Holmes’s rendition almost defies definition. It begins haunted, but gradually rises to a possessed roar, as Holmes wails over and over again: “There’s no discharge in the war.” By its climax he’s screaming at the top of his voice, a prisoner of his own madness. It’s a scarring listen. It is also the soundtrack to the 28 Years Later trailer.
Not at first, obviously, because the first sound you hear in the trailer is incidental music from the original Teletubbies series; it begins as a flashback to the start of the zombie outbreak, and presumably that’s what was on TV when it happened. But after 30 seconds, an unsettling vinyl hiss comes in, and that’s when Holmes starts talking, the intensity of his words growing by the line. And, true, on repeated listens, it’s clear that the trailer editors couldn’t quite resist adding a few big drums towards the end. But this is a poem about the endless marching of feet to battle, so it’s slightly more of a thematic fit than when they do it to a Bob Dylan tune.
The effect of the poem is so immediately disturbing that it took me a few watches to actually pay attention to the visuals. And by all accounts they look pretty good. Shot on, of all things, an iPhone, the trailer is full of freaky folk-horror images. There are burning graves and towers made of skulls, dilapidated signs and spooky causeways. There is also one extremely decrepit zombie who, if I didn’t know better, appears to have the exact bone structure of Cillian Murphy. And through it all is Aaron Taylor-Johnson hustling across the countryside with a bow and arrow. It looks like it’ll be quite a good film.
But that’s all by the by. 28 Years Later could stink to high heaven and it wouldn’t harm the impact of this trailer. It’s a fool’s errand to predict trends, but I wouldn’t be surprised if more movies – particularly horrors – start using obscure old 78rpm spoken-word recordings to soundtrack their trailers. Maybe one of Harry E Humphrey’s doomy festive bible recordings would be a good place to start. But until then, we still have Taylor Holmes and his nightmarish Boots rendition. Too late to make it Christmas No 1?
• The headline of this article was amended on 11 December 2024 to make clear that it is the recital of the poem that dates from 1915, not the poem itself as an earlier version indicated.
