I’ve always found the zombie debate amongst horror fans quite interesting as it offers a glimpse at people’s personalities. The debate I’m talking about is which zombies are better and scarier.
There are those who will always choose the zombies that were born out of George A. Romero’s imagination. I’m talking about the recently dead who have been revived to feed on fresh human flesh. These zombies also could be distinguished by their slow-moving nature with speed only a consequence of stumbling forward when prey is near. These are the zombies which made the genre itself so popular and so widely imitated since Romero first introduced them in the 1968 horror classic, Night of the Living Dead. While slow and easily avoided their numbers alone is the danger. The fact that not just those bitten turn into zombies, but anyone who dies whether by natural or unnatural cause makes them scary. This literally means that death itself has died and anyone who dies and not found immediately returns as a threat to the group.
The second type of zombies which have made a major renaissance in the last decade are the running zombies. Running zombies are not really new since Italian horror filmmakers during the 80’s used them frequently and were really made popular by the horror-comedy franchise of Return of the Living Dead their ability to scare lies more towards the fact that they’re fast. They’re not slow-moving and not easily avoided. It’s their very lively movements which puts the scare into people. The one consequence of the running zombies have been those using them to create a cause for the zombie. Whether it’s a biological/viral weapon gone amok or something supernatural (Brian Keene’s zombie novels uses this).
The third type is a combination of the two where the zombies are not slow moving, but can get up to speed when really motivated. These types also have a tendency to have intelligence beyond mere primal. They’ve retained either a modicum of their former brainpower or all of it. Enough so that they can talk, create plans to trap and/or even organize beyond the hive-mentality of the Romero-type. These kind of zombies have been relegated to novels and short stories. While still not prevalent in films they do provide genuine scares due to the fact that intelligence of the surviving humans stop being an advantage when fighting against zombies.
My choice has always been the Romero-type since they remain the most frightening in the most existential way possible. There’s no reason why people should lose to them yet in every film and story using the type these zombies always end up prevailing in the end. The other two I like as well, but bring up too many reasons of why losing to them is a possibility even with the advantages resting mostly on the survivors.
I’m sure this debate will continue to rage amongst horror fans and I’m sure it will get heated at times.
Through the Shattered Lens 
I also find the “Type I’ zombie the most frightening, as a concept. As you described, they are fairly easily evaded or dispatched as individuals, but so often collectively prevail as their infection spreads and they relentlessly seek to feed their appetite.
The “Type IIs” can be scary, as well, but I find them to be less so, unless they maintain some of the hallmarks of the Type I’s. The 28 Days/Weeks Later creatures were only arguably zombies. I think those were very good movies, but more for pot and story features than for the creatures. I thought this type of zombie was better-realized in the Dawn Of The Dead remake (2004).
As for the “Type IIIs”, Romero kind of anticipated/invented those in Land Of The Dead. I had mixed feelings about that. It’s an interesting idea, but as the creatures become more intelligent and sentient, and therefore more human, they become less scary.
I guess I’m Old School. I like the ones that crawl out of the grave, ala Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and Zombi (and of course, Night Of The Living Dead).
As for mobility, it would seem logical that the longer the body has been dead, the less limber and strong it would be. So those folks that die from the infection and almost immediately reanimate would be strong and fast, whereas those that rise from coffins would be clumsy and lumbering in proportion to their length of interment.
(I apparently like zombie movies, since the question you posed inspired so much analysis.)
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I’ve been meaning to respond to this for ages now but unfortunately, I got sidetracked by the extraction of my wisdom teeth.
To me, the type I zombies are scary because they’re so relentless in their approach. They just keep coming until eventually you’re overwhelmed. This was certainly something that Romero captured to excellent effect in Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead and Lucio Fulci pulled it off with Zombi as well. In all of these movies, the zombies are — at first — almost comical figures. They move so slowly and so clumsily that the audience — much like Roger in Dawn — is lulled into a false sense of security. This make it all the more shocking when, at the end of each of these movies, the zombies eventually end up winning, overwhelming the living through the force of sheer numbers. This also highlights one of the themes that is present in all of the best zombie movies — that there’s a limited amount of living but there’s always going to be new members of the dead.
However, I also like the fast zombies, as seen in 28 Days After and Nightmare City. But, as KO pointed out above, these fast zombies aren’t really zombies. They’re human beings who have been infected by an incurable disease. However, to me, the thing with the fast zombies in that, again, there’s an unlimited amount of them and 2) the living lose even the advantage of speed when confronted with them.
So, I guess I find the fast zombies to be scarier but I find the slow zombies to be more disturbing. The fast zombies are best for “Boo!” jump in your seat type horror but the slow zombies work better if you want the type of scary movie that inspires nightmares.
Personally, if I ever do make a zombie movie, I’m going to go for a hybrid approach, zombies that move slow but attack quickly.
By the way, if anyone really wants to see a great movie concerning slow “zombies,” check out Tombs of the Blind Dead, a Spanish film from the early 70s that proves that anything can look menacing if it’s shown in slow-mo.
As for the Type III zombie, that really doesn’t seem so much like a zombie to me as just a malevolent spirit. Still, I do like the idea of the zombies having some sort of fragmentary knowledge from their past lives. Romero, of course, used this in both Day and Land of the Dead but another good example would be an otherwise-terrible Italian film called Burial Ground where the zombies are former peasants who, upon coming back to life, use the tools of their former profession to seek vengeance on the decadent living. (I’ve always thought of Burial Ground as being one of the few truly Marxist zombie films.)
Probably the best example of this type of zombie would be Jean Rollin’s The Living Dead Girl but that movie is hardly a traditional zombie film.
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There’s actually a novel which combines both slow and fast. The people infected by a virus become like rage-infected and rush and sprint toward their victims. They’re still alive but just out of their mind. The twist comes once those infected are shot down and killed. Once those infected are killed they reanimate as the slow types. It’s by Z.A. Recht and called Plague of the Dead and has a sequel called Thunder and Ashes.
The intelligent zombies have mostly stayed in the realm of books and novels. Brian Keene’s zombies are pretty much dead bodies who have been possessed by demons from another dimension. It’s actually an interesting take on the zombie archetype. One zombie novel that actually combines all three is Philip Nutman’s Wet Work. It has slow zombies, fast zombies and zombies who retain all their memories, full motor functions and personalities.
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