Overview
Zach Dinesen’s Ghost is a short story in Quarterlives. It follows the narrator, a film-industry acquaintance of Zach Dinesen, as Zach becomes obsessed with making a horror film about a tortured American bomber crew.
The story is set in contemporary entertainment-industry circles in Los Angeles and later around a film production in Japan. Its supernatural element centers on an apparition that Zach first understands as a dead American airman and later identifies as a malevolent oni or yokai.
Plot
The narrator introduces Zach Dinesen as a filmmaker and USC alumnus whose low-budget alien abduction feature, Not of This Earth, is picked up by Hulu in 2022. The narrator and Zach know each other from a 2019 internship at New Doc Management in Beverly Hills, where they work for different managers and remain loosely friendly afterward.
After Not of This Earth succeeds, Zach signs with Jason Kovac at Fine Idea Management. He later asks the narrator to meet him for dinner in El Segundo and explains that he has become obsessed with the story of an American B-29 crew shot down over Japan in 1945 and tortured to death. Zach says a dead airman named Dale Plambeck appeared at the foot of his bed and asked Zach to tell the crew’s story so he could find peace.
The narrator finds the material grim and understands why Jason does not want to take the pitch to Blumhouse. Zach nevertheless pitches the project to Blumhouse behind Jason’s back. Blumhouse declines, and Jason drops Zach as a client.
Zach keeps working on the project, grows visibly unwell, and writes many drafts. He tells the narrator he has contacted Plambeck’s descendants and that they have told him not to contact them again. He then secures a Chinese financier willing to fund the film and plans to shoot in Japan with American actors. The narrator warns him that the budget and permits are unlikely to work, but Zach says the production has prepared a false alternate script to obtain location permission.
The project nearly collapses several times, but financing and permits eventually come together. While visiting Japan, the narrator travels north of Tokyo to see Zach’s set. He finds Zach healthier and calmer than expected and becomes impressed by the production’s scale.
Three weeks later, Ann Jones, Zach’s first assistant director, contacts the narrator because Zach has disappeared after a stunt injures an actor. Zach gives the narrator cryptic directions, and the narrator finds him hiding in a garage beneath an old woman’s house. Zach says a rubber hacksaw on set was somehow replaced with a real one, badly cutting an actor, and insists the swap could not have happened ordinarily.
Zach also says the apparition was never Dale Plambeck. He now believes it is a malevolent Japanese spirit using the production to watch the airmen’s suffering performed again. Zach says the entity is hunting him and will trap him in a nightmare if it catches him.
The narrator treats Zach’s account as a breakdown and tries to bring him back to the car. Zach panics, threatens him with garden shears, and forces him to promise not to tell Ann where he is.
Back in Tokyo, the narrator tells Ann he found Zach and meets her for dinner with two representatives from the Chinese financing company. When asked whether the production can be saved with a new director, he says they should not spend more money. He believes the film is scrapped and returns home five days later.
The narrator states he has not seen Zach since. He hears that Zach is making another Japan-set film with Korean hedge-fund financing and sees a script with Zach’s byline and the working title Concrete Barrel Girl.