The Origin of That Haunting Spoken Word Poem in ’28 Years Later’ Trailer

There are many highly-anticipated horror movies coming to the big screen in 2025. One of them is a sequel: 28 Years Later. The trailer for the film was released this week and while they used a thrilling score to enhance the action at the start of the trailer, filmmakers also used a poem during the remaining half. A very disturbing one which intensifies more and more as the trailer plays out.

The soul-stirring narration is taken from a famous poem by Rudyard Kipling called Boots.

You may know the name Kipling from a more family-friendly film, The Jungle Book, which Disney adapted from his 1894 anthology of the same name. One story from that book might be familiar to anyone who ever took an English Lit class: Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

For 28 Years Later, they used a 1915 spoken-word recording of Boots by American actor Taylor Holmes.

The poem was also used to motivate soldiers in SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training during World War II.

Kipling’s haunting poem does have a military origin, it is supposed to mimic the repetitive thoughts in cadence with the footfalls of a British infantryman marching to what might be his doom during the Second Boer War that took place in South Africa from 1899 to 1902.

Some people on Reddit remember Holmes’ recording from their time at SERE training, one saying, “It’s not just the poem. It’s the voice of the person reading it. More than 20 years later, and I have chills thinking about it.”

Another recalls, “When I did SERE in 1991, this reading was on loop with Boots and Electric Orgasm by Yoko Ono for pretty much 48 hours.”

Below is a video of a video of Holmes reading the original version in case you couldn’t make out what was being said while watching the trailer.

28 Years Later opens in theaters on June 20, 2025.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries