Land of the Dead / Diary of the Dead / Survival of the Dead

Near the end of Diary of the Dead, the female narrator who is assembling material collected throughout the first days of a zombie outbreak says “It used to be us against us. Now it's us against them.” Among the three films, Diary is the only one dealing with the immediate effects, the first few days, after the world changed radically: Land of the Dead is set a couple of years in, when the normal life is only a vague memory, and Survival of the Dead is even further into the future, when the non-existence of natural death is already so deeply ingrained into society that some consider the option of permanent integration of the walking dead.
Us against them is almost comforting because it reduces the complexities of the situation. It is the initial reaction, when everybody is running away as the structures of society fall apart, and it is a logic that serves the narrator well, since it provides the backdrop for her documentary. Survival of the Dead is more concerned with how reality is constructed and distorted in the news coverage of a catastrophe and throws a group of film students into the immediate aftermath of the outbreak. 

The mainstream had vanished with all its power and money. Now it was just us, bloggers, hackers, kids. The more voices there are, the more spin there is. The truth becomes that much harder to find. In the end, it's all just noise.

The set-up serves as a stage to negotiate the (inherent?) manipulation of reality once a camera is involved, and some of the statements on the media in general are both too much of a generalization and too heavy-handed to make for a truly great film, but the argument is still strong: the cameras change those who operate them, they seem to remove them from the events, and as the group travels to find some kind of safety, those with the interpretative authority choose not to intervene, even when their friends are in danger. At the same time, they edit reality and construct a narrative which deviates from what actually happened, eventually shouting the same stage directions they used in their production of a fictional horror film at one of their female friends when she is chased by actual zombies.

The zombie, unlike the two other creatures that haunt horror movies (vampires and werewolves), lacks the ability to articulate himself. He is not mostly human with a desire or need to feed off human blood; he isn’t just bound to his monstrous form for a couple of days each month. He isn’t just a creature because he feeds off human flesh – he is also radically different because once fully transformed, he loses the ability to speak. The zombie isn’t just a threat, he is also comfortably removed from humanity, so that killing him, even if there is no immediate danger, does not require any further justification. Romero elaborates on this idea in both Land and Survival: years after the outbreak of the virus (and in Romero’s world it’s not just humans who were bitten, but everybody who dies), some of the zombies are starting to perform as humans. Once turned, they resume whatever it was they did before, even though their behaviour is fragmented, like a shadow of their previous human self. The narrator of Diary continues her sentence: "Except they are us". Their features are still uncomfortably recognizable, making the transformation of a loved one even more terrible, and more than that, once the initial chaos and destruction is over and humanity has found a different kind of normalcy, they try and act human too, even though they remain inaccessible because they can not speak.

Mike: They're pretending to be alive...
Riley: Isn't that what we're doing? Pretending to be alive?
[Land of the Dead]

Land of the Dead is the oldest of the three movies, but it is set years after the initial outbreak. While the clear-cut us against them dynamics hints that this bridges class, race and culture: that finally a common enemy for all humanity unites us in a fight against them, the society emerging from the trauma is still strictly divided, even more than before now that those with power and influence are the only ones who can afford to live in a (false sense of) security. The setting of Land is some kind of city in which the rich live in gated communities while to poor improvise to stay alive. Some do better than others by providing their services to the rich: they take care of their dirty laundry and provide the luxurious lifestyle, but even if that affords them some kind of wealth on their own, entrance into the circle of the powerful is still impossible (Dennis Hopper’s character turns down the hopes of one of his lackeys to live in the luxurious and safe skyscraper, the ultimate gated community: there’s a waiting list, he says sneering, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of living alongside someone who used to work for him). The true enemy, the true villain, aren’t the zombies outside who are slowly learning to think and comprehend their own situation, it is still the greedy who live in luxury while the masses are starving and can’t find medicine. When the man who was denied entrance into the circle of the powerful is finally bitten and faced with the decision of whether to put a bullet into his own brain or let the virus take over, he smiles, and says, “I always wanted to know how the other half lives.”
The zombies take on a different function in Land of the Dead: instead of threatening the heroes we identify with, they provide a cathartic revenge fantasy against the decadent rich who end up slaughtered among the ruins of their own shopping mall, while the heroes drive away, deciding not to kill the zombies because “All they want is somewhere to go. Same as us.”
Survival of the Dead adds another layer to the idea that the zombies are merely another class of people one equally concerned with their own survival as any other: there are two opposing ideologies in this movie, one that makes a clear distinction between humans and zombies, and another that tries to realize a different society, on in which the zombies continue to exist in their previous community, performing simple tasks (if only they could be conditioned to feast on animal flesh rather than human). The viewers follow a group that is fighting against the man who is trying to realize this idea, and it is only in the end that one of the soldiers admits that he was focused on one side of the argument that it was impossible for him to recognize that the opposing one might have been valid too.

In an us-versus-them world, someone puts up a flag, another person tears it down and puts up his own. Pretty soon no one remembers what started the war in the first place and the fighting becomes all about those stupid flags.
[Survival of the Dead]

After all, how does society change if death is no longer a reality, if nobody dies of a natural death and the only way to make sure that a loved one does not return as a flesh-eating zombie is by putting a bullet through their brain? Integrating them into society, if that is possible, might provide a relief from the terrible loss, especially in a tightly knit community in which family is everything (the conflict between the two men takes place on a secluded island on which almost everybody is related). In the end, the two men seem to be trapped in a never-ending loop, always meeting on a hill for a duel about who is right, but never able to kill each other, now that they are both zombies.
 

Land of the Dead (2005), directed by George A. Romero, starring Simon Baker, John Leguizamo, Robert Joy, Asia Argento, Dennis Hopper. 

Diary of the Dead (2007), directed by George A. Romero, starring Joshua Close, Shawn Roberts, Amy Ciupak Lalonde, Joe Dinicol, Scott Wentworth, Philip Riccio. 

Survival of the Dead (2009), directed by George A. Romero, starring Alan van Sprang, Kenneth Welsh, Kathleen Munroe, Athena Karkanis.