IIf you’re honest with yourself, you probably weren’t particularly excited about 28 Years Later when you first heard about it. For as entertaining as 2002’s 28 Days Later was, 2007’s 28 Weeks Later showed signs of diminishing returns. It wasn’t that scary. It wasn’t that memorable. And it turns out that six months after a zombie outbreak, things just weren’t as interesting as they were four weeks after. By rights, 28 Years Later should continue this trend. And when it comes out, that could still prove to be the case. At the moment, however, it is probably the most exciting film of 2025. And that is mainly due to its trailer.

By now you know the basic formula for most movie trailers. Pick any song from the last 50 years, any song, and record a new version of it. The first half is intended to be dreamy and distant, the second is punctuated by big, echoing drums that fit the action well. Most recently, the Minecraft movie trailer did this with “Magical Mystery Tour,” “Babygirl” did this with “Make You Mine” by Madison Beer, and even “A Complete Unknown” managed to get huge drum noises in “Like a Rolling Stone.” integrate.

But 28 years later, you sense that all that will change. The U.S. Navy runs something called “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape,” a training program aimed at equipping military personnel with the skills necessary to survive in hostile environments. Part of it involves keeping them in a small cell while they are repeatedly played the most horrifying thing available to the staff: a 1915 recording of actor Taylor Holmes reciting Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Boots.”

The poem itself is chilling enough, the percussive chant of an infantryman marching into battle trying to overcome his nagging sense of impending doom. But Holmes’ interpretation almost defies definition. It begins eerily, but gradually builds to a possessed roar as Holmes repeatedly wails, “There is no discharge in war.” At the climax, he screams loudly, a prisoner of his own madness. It’s a painful listen. It is also the soundtrack to the trailer for 28 Years Later.

Not at first, of course, because the first sound you hear in the trailer is incidental music from the original Teletubbies series; It starts off as a flashback to the beginning of the zombie outbreak, and that’s probably exactly what was on TV when it happened. But after 30 seconds, there’s an unsettling vinyl hiss, and then Holmes begins to speak, the intensity of his words increasing from line to line. And indeed, upon repeated listens, it becomes clear that the trailer editors couldn’t quite resist adding a few big drums towards the end. But this is a poem about the endless march of feet into battle, so it fits thematically a little better than if they set it to a Bob Dylan tune.

The effect of the poem is so immediately disturbing that it took me a few hours to actually pay attention to the images. And by all accounts they look pretty good. The trailer was shot on an iPhone of all things and is full of crazy folk horror images. There are burning tombs and towers of skulls, dilapidated signs and spooky causeways. There’s also an extremely decrepit zombie who, if I didn’t know better, appears to have the exact bone structure of Cillian Murphy. And meanwhile Aaron Taylor-Johnson rushes through the landscape with a bow and arrow. It looks like it’s going to be a pretty good movie.

But that’s all incidental. “28 Years Later” could stink to high heaven and would not detract from the impact of this trailer. It’s a silly task trying to predict trends, but I wouldn’t be surprised if more films – especially horror films – started using obscure old 78rpm spoken word recordings as the soundtrack for their trailers. Perhaps one of Harry E. Humphrey’s dark celebratory Bible recordings would be a good place to start. But until then, we still have Taylor Holmes and his nightmarish boat interpretation. Too late for Christmas No. 1?