The terrifying trailer that turned Rudyard Kipling into a Gen Z hero

A 1903 poem that perfectly describes the horror and monotony of war has been turned into a movie trailer 28 Years Later [28 years later] in a sensation. What makes it so terrifying?

By: Boris Starling / The Daily Telegraph
Translation: Telegrafi.com

This is possibly the scariest trailer you'll hear this year. No, not the one you'll "see," although the sights are pretty gruesome—a bloody body hanging upside down, piles of skulls, a mask of horror—but, the one you'll hear. The trailer that will premiere in 2025, 28 Years Later – the final film in the zombie trilogy, directed by Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, after 28 Days Later [28 days later] of 2002 and 28 Weeks Later [28 weeks later] of 2007 – is accompanied by a recitation of Rudyard Kipling's poem, Boots [Boots].

Poems by Rudyard Kipling:

- I'm Nana
- In munch
- whether

No soundtrack would be more disturbing or shocking, and few would have gripped the collective imagination of the internet world like poetry has. Boots, with thousands of social media shares and likes.

Written in 1903, Boots describes the thoughts of a British Army infantryman who was forced to march in South Africa - during the Second Boer War which had just ended. Monotonous and deliberately repetitive, the poem is precisely measured: reading the first four words of each line at a rate of two words per second coincides exactly with the pace at which the soldiers marched. The trailer uses only a few parts of the poem, while the horror adds to each verse.

Seven – six – eleven – five – twenty-nine miles today
Four – eleven – seventeen – thirty-two days ago –
Boots – boots – boots – boots – moving up and down again!
There is no escape from war!

Don't - don't - don't - don't - look at what's in front of you.
Boot – boot – boot – boot – moving up and down again;
Men - men - men - men - men go crazy looking at them,
And there is no escape from war!

If – the eyes – yours - close - they will defeat you!
Boots – boots – boots – boots – moving up and down again –
There is no escape from war!

Try – try – try – try – to think of something else
Oh – my – God – protect me from madness!
Boots – boots – boots – boots – moving up and down again!
There is no escape from war!

But it's not just the words that stick in the mind: it is also the way they are recited. The recording used is from 1915 by American actor Taylor Holmes, who starred in more than 100 Broadway shows in the first half of the XNUMXth century. His recitation is measured from the beginning, with clear pronunciation and vowels that last a little longer than usual; but, in the middle of the declamation, his voice trembles at a few words, and in the last stanza he practically howls, losing all reason in the face of the madness of the foot soldier. It's the stuff of nightmares.

Holmes' version is so iconic that it's not the first time it's been used. Not only was it used in the marketing campaign for the game Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 this year, but has also been used in real US military training, playing in the background to simulate the stress of interrogation.

"Anyone who attended the US Navy's Survival, Evasion, Endurance and Escape (SERE) school never forgets this poem," says author and former airman Ward Carroll. SERE is one of the most intensive trainings the US military undergoes, and one can imagine the effects of constantly hearing Holmes' voice on fatigue, demoralization and disorientation.

Besides wanting to see the movie when it comes out next June, the success of the trailer 28 Years Later it is expected to have two main effects. First, it will change the way trailers are created. They're no longer just promotions for upcoming movies: they're increasingly regarded as small works of art, and the best of them, like this one, can go viral.

In recent years, trailers have typically followed a certain pattern: revisiting a famous song over visuals that often tell almost the entire story of the film. With the online success of 28 Years Later, we can expect the filmmakers to look for other equally terrifying poems, like "In my brain I felt the funeral" [I felt a funeral, in my brain] by Emily Dickinson, The second coming [The Second Coming] by WB Yeats or anything by Edgar Allan Poe.

Second, this trailer will introduce a new generation to Kipling's works. He is, of course, best known for The Jungle Book [The Jungle Book], although Disney's 1967 and 2016 adaptations have simplified the complexity of the original. His two lines from the poem whether [If] – “If you can meet with Triumph and Calamity / And treat them both rogues alike” – are inscribed on the player's entrance to the Wimbledon Tennis Centre.

But he created much more than these works, even though some parts of his work are now considered problematic. It would be difficult for anyone to approve of the use of poetry The white man's burden [The White Man's Burden], which was published in the same review as Boots and which is now criticized as imperialist and racist.

Kipling was a prolific and versatile author, moving easily between prose and poetry and writing for both children and adults. He remains the youngest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he accepted at the age of 41. "Kipling seems to me, personally, to be the most complete man of genius, quite unlike any other intelligence I have ever known," said Henry James. It would be quite a contemporary ordeal if a zombie movie trailer prompted Gen Z to test this claim for themselves. /Telegraph/