Diary of the Dead: suspension of disbelief

I just watched George Romero's latest (I think) film Diary of the Dead, in which he reboots, so to speak, his long-running series by going back to the first appearance of zombies but setting it in the near-present, as opposed to 1968 when Night of the Living Dead appeared. Reviews may have been mixed, or so I surmise from the obscurity of the sources of the blurbs on the DVD box. But I enjoyed it, though it has its flaws: in particular, some of the "meaningful" dialogue comes off as pretentious. (I'm unusual, though, in that I preferred Night of the Living Dead to Dawn of the Dead.)

But there's one major aspect of the film which I have a hard time suspending my disbelief for. As I said, the film takes place in the present, as the role played by the Web makes clear. And the protagonists are film students who, as the film begins, are making a horror movie. But nobody ever mentions any of Romero's films, although they would be the first thing that would come to anyone's mind if they began hearing reports about the dead returning to life and eating the living. What's more, nobody ever even says the word "zombie." Now, I understand the convention by which, for example, the South Park doesn't exist in the South Park universe, although shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy do. But flesh-eating zombies are now such a major part of our popular culture that to simply "delete" them doesn't work, at least not for me.