When the first trailer arrived for “28 Years Later,” the third installment in Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s masterful series of horror films, its gruesome images of zombies and a dystopian world were scary.
But what makes the trailer even more terrifying is an eerie, rhythmic chant by a high, nasal voice, moving with a military cadence, monotonal at first but growing increasingly louder and more agitated as it goes on, with the images and haunting musical backdrop growing in speed and intensity as it progresses.
Somehow, in that context, the chant, even though the words seem unrelated to the images, is absolutely horrifying, like a deranged rap song. Its use in the film makes an ominous scene even more so.
The chant is actually “Boots,” a poem by Rudyard Kipling, first published in 1903 and intended to convey the maddening monotony of soldiers marching; the direct inspiration was the hundreds of miles British troops were forced to march across southern Africa in the Second Boer War around the turn of the last century, according to the Kipling Society.
The recording used in the film is nearly as old as the poem itself, voiced in 1915 by actor Taylor Holmes. It is a dramatic reading that starts off militaristic as the initial lines set the scene, but his voice is patently hysterical by the end, even as it follows the lock-step rhythm of the first five syllables:
“I—have—marched—six—weeks in hell and certify
It—is—not—fire—devils, dark, or anything,
But boots—boots—boots—boots—movin’ up and down again,
And there’s no discharge in the war!
Try—try—try—try—to think of something different
Oh—my—God—keep—me from going lunatic!”
The poem has served as a march for a variety of armies over the years, and the recording is frightening enough to have been used for its psychological impact by the U.S. military in its SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) schools.
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Unusually for something featured so prominently in a trailer, the poem plays a very small, although foreboding, role in the film — buttressed with an eerie bass synthesizer, it soundtracks Spike and his father walking to the mainland, which is thick with infected zombies, and presumably conveys that they’re marching to war.
But out of everything that could have been used to deliver that message, why a 110-year-old recording of a poem that dates back to the peak of the British Empire? Boyle explained in an interview with Variety last week.
“We had all these archives that we wanted to use to suggest the culture that the island was teaching its children,” he says. “It was very much a regressive thing — they were looking back to a time when England was great.
“It’s very much linked to Shakespeare,” he continues. “For those who know the ‘Henry the Fifth’ film, there’s a very famous speech, the Saint Crispin’s Day speech, which is about the noble, heroic English beating the French with their bows and arrows. We were searching for a song, for a hymn — for a speech, actually. We did think about using the Crispin’s Day speech at one point, but that felt too on the nose.
“And then we watched the first trailer that Sony sent us — Alex and I remember it vividly — and there was this [recording] on it, and we were like, ‘Fucking hell!’ It was startling in its power.
“The trailer is a very good trailer, but there was something more than that about that [recording], about that tune, about that poem. We tried it in our archive sequence, and it was like it was made for it.”
How did the recording get into that first trailer? According to David Fruchbom, Sony EVP of global creative advertising, it was suggested by Megan Barbour, then director of music at the Buddha Jones agency, after she was briefed on the film’s script. Barbour, who knew the recording from someone who had been in SERE training, then sent it to trailer editor Bill Neil. “We wanted to work off the strength of the visuals and didn’t want a lot of dialogue,” Fruchbom said. “Buddha Jones [submitted] three different teaser trailers, and the one that had ‘Boots’ was clearly the way to go.”
It was so effective that Boyle was quick to incorporate it into the film.
“It’s like a reverse osmosis,” he says. “It came into the film and seemed to make sense of so much of what we’d been trying to reach for.”
He also notes that Kipling’s words and Holmes’ voice, echoing across the decades in a context neither ever could have imagined, somehow take on a new power today.
“You have to hold your hand up and say, ‘How is it that something recorded over 100 years ago has that same visceral power that it was always intended to have?,’” he marvels. “It still maintains it — in a TikTok world, it still has that impact. It’s amazing.”
Additional reporting by Bill Earl.
From Variety US