Overview
Zach Dinesen is the central character of “Zach Dinesen’s Ghost.” He is a filmmaker whose successful low-budget debut leads to an obsessive production about a tortured American bomber crew.
Biography
Zach is a USC alumnus and filmmaker. He meets the narrator in 2019 while both are interning at New Doc Management in Beverly Hills. They work for different managers, connect on Instagram, and remain loose acquaintances.
In 2022, Zach’s alien abduction feature Not of This Earth gets into Fantastic Fest and is picked up by Hulu. The film’s success brings him a payment, positive attention, and representation from Jason Kovac at Fine Idea Management.
After signing with Jason, Zach becomes fixated on a film about an American B-29 crew shot down over Japan in 1945 and tortured to death. He tells the narrator that a dead airman named Dale Plambeck appeared at the foot of his bed and asked Zach to tell his story so he could find peace.
Zach pitches the project to Blumhouse after Jason refuses to take it out. Blumhouse declines, and Jason drops Zach. Zach keeps writing drafts, contacts Plambeck’s descendants against their wishes, and eventually finds Chinese financing for a Japan shoot. He also prepares a false alternate script to help obtain Japanese permits.
During production in Japan, Zach initially appears calm, healthy, and capable. After a stunt injures an actor, however, he disappears from the set. The narrator finds him hiding in a garage in the countryside. Zach says a rubber hacksaw has been impossibly replaced with a real one, and he claims the ghost that visited him was not Plambeck but an oni or yokai manipulating the production.
Zach says the entity is hunting him and begs the narrator to stop the film. When the narrator tries to bring him back to the car, Zach threatens him with garden shears and forces him not to reveal the hiding place.
The narrator has not seen Zach since Japan, but later hears that Zach is developing another Japan-set film under the working title Concrete Barrel Girl.