cross-posted from: feddit.uk/post/21146401
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.