What if the infected maintained their self-awareness and could speak but were just just ultraviolent
The key element, I think, is lack of self-awareness. The zombies of legend aren't following their own will, but are controlled by the
bokor who created them. Romero's zombies (originally referred to as "ghouls") have no minds of their own, they're just puppets to whatever force reanimated them - but then neither do Boyle's Infected, since the Rage virus makes them incapable of rational thought, and they're guided by nothing but elevated aggression. To offer another example, the creatures in
The Last of Us go through several stages of infection, becoming less and less human as they go. By the time they reach the "clicker" stage they arguably don't even have a brain any more.
The common thread is that it's a body operating without a mind of its own, which I see as the defining trait of a "zombie". It's got nothing to do with whether or not it's breathing, or how violent it is, or whether the force that created it is supernatural.
Whedon's Reavers are sometimes lumped into the zombie category due to the hyper-aggressive way they behaved in the
Serenity film, but in the
Firefly TV show they were implied (since they never actually appeared on screen) to be extremely brutal and methodical sadists rather than raging berserkers. The "dark seekers" (stupid name) in
I Am Legend are extremely primitive, but if you follow the plot thread regarding the alpha male and his mate - which was set up in the original version of the film, and then discarded in the ridiculous tacked-on "hand grenade" ending - they're clearly capable of rational thought.
The Borg from
Star Trek are hard to define, since they think rationally but are part of a hive mind, so each individual drone is technically operating without a kind of its own. I tend to think of them as "cyber-zombies" of a sort, though your mileage may vary.
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