In Romero's Dead trilogy (+1), the dead exist as a community with no common bond beyond their hunger for the living. While this is a specific difference and common trait, it is no obstacle for the dead as the living are welcome to cross over and join the dead.

In "Crowds and Power" Elias Canetti wrote:

"It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose physical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. Ideally, all are equal there; no distinctions count, not even that of sex. The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body. This is perhaps one of the reasons why a crowd seeks to close in on itself: it wants to rid each individual as completely as possible of the fear of being touched. The more fiercely people press together, the more certain they feel that they do not fear each other. The reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest."

As in The Coming Community's discussion of contemporary life living under the sign of fascism, the living react with the worst sort of fascism to the existence of the undead. The dead are hunted, they are rounded up in camps, they are exiled to ghettos and in the Day of the Dead, they are subject to medical experiments . Living friends who are bitten and thus becoming undead are shot at the moment they cross over. They are thus dead, forever, instead of undead. While the dead kill the living and thus a reason to kill the dead is established, those who are killed do not die but instead join the ranks of the undead. What the living fear most, in Romero's trilogy, is not death but the unbeing of becoming undead.


"In the early 1970s there was an advertisement shown in Paris movie theaters that promoted a well-known brand of French stockings, 'Dim' stockings. It showed a group of young women dancing together. Anyone who ever watched even a few of its images, however distractedly, would have a hard time forgetting the special impression of synchrony and dissonance, of confusion and singularity, of communication and estrangement that emanated from the bodies of the smiling dancers. This impression relied on a trick: Each dancer was filmed separately and later the single pieces were brought together over a single sound track. But that facile trick, that calculated asymmetry of the movement of long legs sheathed in the same inexpensive commodity, that slight disjunction between the gestures, wafted over the audience a promise of happiness unequivocally related to the human body."

Sea Sponge

Sponges are also the earliest sexual reproducers; most are hermaphroditic, producing both eggs and sperm, which they release into the water. The sperm drift along until they find their way into the tunnels and caves of another sponge. But the sponge has other reproductive options. If you push one through a sieve, breaking free its individual cells, these cells will drift until they find each other, then stick together and create an exact genetic duplicate of the parent. If wounded, a sponge doesn’t need to grow new tissue; it simply moves old cells into the wound to close it. These techniques have helped sponges survive at least 500 million years.
The sponge is the earliest, most primitive multicelled animal, Sogin says. Some scientists believe the ability to grow different cell types started animals on the evolutionary road to becoming humans. With just a few kinds of cells, only loosely connected, the sponge manages to produce a variety of asymmetrical shapes, from cups and fans to tubes and piecrust shapes. Sponges survive handsomely on their own and can even shelter other sea creatures: Scientists found a large sponge in the Gulf of Mexico hosting 16,000 snapping shrimp and 1,000 other aquatic animals. The sponge’s cells, its calcium carbonate or glasslike silica spicules, and the mass of collagen that forms its visible body all create a network of tunnels and chambers, with little flailing hairs called cilia on the walls that wave the water through and filter out plankton and waste. No matter how large the sponge, it can eat only what its individual cells can absorb.
http://discovermagazine.com/2004/nov/this-is-your-ancestor