Don’t – don’t – don’t – don’t – look at what’s in front of you. Boots – boots – boots – boots – movin’ up an’ down again; Men – men – men – men – men go mad with watchin’ em, An’ there’s no discharge in the war!
If - your - eyes - drop - they will get atop o’ you! Boots – boots – boots – boots – movin’ up and down again – There’s no discharge in the war!
Try – try – try – try – to think o’ something different Oh – my – God – keep – me from goin’ lunatic! Boots – boots – boots – boots – movin’ up an’ down again! There’s no discharge in the war!
But it’s not just the words themselves that stick in one’s brain: it’s also the way they’re delivered. The recording used is a 1915 one by Taylor Holmes, an American actor who appeared in more than 100 Broadway plays in the first half of the 20th century. His delivery is relatively measured to start with, clearly enunciated and holding on to the vowel sounds just a little longer than normal: but by the time he gets to halfway his voice is quavering on certain words, and over the final quatrain he’s practically screaming, all reason lost in the face of the infantryman’s own incipient madness. It’s proper nightmare fuel.
Holmes’s version is so iconic that this is by no means its first outing. Not only was it used as part of the marketing campaign for the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 earlier this year, but it has long been a staple of real-life US military training, played on a loop to trainees in order to mimic the stresses of interrogation.
“Anyone who has ever attended the US Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape [SERE] school will never forget the poem,” says author and former naval aviator Ward Carroll. SERE is some of the most intense training that US military personnel undergo, and the effects of listening to Holmes’s voice on repeat while exhausted, demoralised and disorientated can only be imagined.
Aside from making people want to watch the film when it’s released next June, the success of the 28 Years Later trailer is likely to have two main effects. Firstly, it will help shift the way trailers are made. They are no longer just simple promotions for upcoming movies: they are increasingly seen as miniature works of art in themselves, and the best of them, like this one, can go viral.
Trailers have in recent years tended to follow a certain template: a reworking of a famous song over footage that can run perilously close to giving away the entire plot of the movie. With the online fever around 28 Years Later, however, expect a rush of directors ransacking the canon for equally terrifying poems: Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a funeral, in my brain”, perhaps, or WB Yeats’ The Second Coming, or pretty much anything by Edgar Allan Poe.
Secondly, the 28 Years Later trailer will introduce a new generation to Kipling and his works. He’s best known in popular culture for The Jungle Book, of course, even if successive Disney adaptations in 1967 and 2016 have flattened and simplified the complexities of his original work, and two lines of his 1910 poem If – “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two impostors just the same” are inscribed by the players’ entrance to Wimbledon’s Centre Court.
But there is so much more to him than just these works, even if at this distance some of his oeuvre is seen as problematic: it would be a brave executive who sanctioned soundtracking a trailer with The White Man’s Burden, for example, a poem which first appeared in the same collection as Boots and which is now widely criticised as imperialist and racist.
Kipling was prolific and versatile, flipping between prose and poetry and writing as easily for children as he did for adults, and at 41 he remains the youngest-ever winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
“Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as opposed to fine intelligence, that I have ever known,” said Henry James. It would be a very contemporary development if the trailer for a zombie movie prompted Generation Z to test that assessment out for themselves.
