Zach Dinesen's Ghost

Fiction: An encounter with a low-budget horror production and the pitfalls of letting your muse take control.

I've been thinking a lot about Zach Dinesen, the filmmaker and USC alumnus. You might have seen his feature, Not of This Earth, on Hulu back in October of 2022. It's a pretty cool and scary ride for a low-budget debut. Zach is my age, down to the month. We've met up about a dozen times over the years outside of work. For a while, we were friends, or at least friendly acquaintances. I respected Zach and his ambition, and he respected me. It wasn't until the last time I saw him that he threatened to kill me.

I met Zach when we were both interning at New Doc Management in 2019. Zach and I were both overdressed. He had this New York thing going on where he talked too much and too loudly because he was nervous. We'd both buy plain bagels for lunch, since they were the only thing in Beverly Hills we could afford.

He and I worked different desks. I filled in as the assistant for a manager named Jeff Cole, who turned out to be a lazy asshole. Zach was on the other side of the office, under the dominion of some blonde Colombian talent manager who really had him over the barrel most days. Towards the end of that internship, we grabbed a beer and connected on Instagram, then proceeded to go our separate ways.

In 2022, Zach got into Fantastic Fest with Not of This Earth, his alien abduction flick that he made in someone's Reno backyard for something like two hundred grand. It got picked up by Hulu, and they put another half million into cleaning it up and getting it out on streaming. He deserved it. It was a good deal, and it was a good movie. When I saw the news, I texted him congratulations, and from there we got to talking again about our respective careers.

Things started going pretty well for Zach after that. The movie was certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. He got a nice little paycheck. He signed with a new manager, Jason Kovac, at Fine Idea Management. It seemed like everyone was excited for him to knuckle down and start working on his next big thing.

Seven months went by before he asked me to meet him for dinner. We got together after dark at a fish and chips place in El Segundo. It was underlit, run down, and desolately empty. I don't know why he picked it. He told me he'd become obsessed with the story of this American bomber crew who'd been shot down over Japan in 1945 and subsequently tortured to death. It was pretty dark stuff. He was agitated, more than I'd ever seen him before, and he told me it was because Jason Kovac refused to take the pitch to Blumhouse. I could see why. The subject matter was grim, and the whole thing sounded like a hard sell, even in the horror genre.

I asked Zach why he was so insistent on this one idea. After an embarrassed pause, he told me the truth. Shortly after he'd signed with Jason, Zach told me, he’d had a vision of a young American bomber crewman standing at the foot of his bed. I tactfully suggested he might have been dreaming, but he swore he was awake and that he'd seen the young man plain as day. The man had told him that his name was Dale Plambeck, and that he needed Zach to tell his story so he could find peace in the afterlife. Zach, as he told it, had proceeded to look up Plambeck the following day. Sure enough, there had been Dale Plambeck in the war, a B-29 navigator shot down over Nagoya.

Zach told me how he'd gone down a rabbit hole reading about the tortured B-29 crew. He’d read a book called The Fallen by Mark Landis, a detailed account of the atrocities they suffered at the hands of Japanese doctors. It wasn't light dinner conversation. In 1945, the B-29 crews were despised by the Japanese. When Plambeck's plane got shot down, eleven of the twelve men managed to parachute to the ground. Two were beaten to death by civilians upon landing. One shot a couple of townspeople with his service pistol before turning it on himself. As it turns out, he was the smart one.

The others were taken to a university hospital where they were promised medical care. One by one, the American airmen were subjected to horrific vivisection, live removal of pieces of their brains, livers, and other organs. One had a lung ripped out and was left to suffocate. Plambeck, the ghost that had visited Zach, had his veins pumped with seawater till he died.

At a certain point, I had to tell Zach to spare me the rest of the details. I've usually got a pretty strong stomach, but even this was testing my limits. I told him frankly that I could see why his manager didn't want him pitching this to Blumhouse. There's fun horror, and then there's unfun horror. This was certainly the latter.

Zach had no sympathy for Jason Kovac’s side of things. He told me in full seriousness that Dale Plambeck needed his story told, that this was non-negotiable to him. It almost sounded like he'd made this project his new life's purpose.

After that dinner, we continued to text, and soon Zach admitted to me that he had gone around Jason and pitched the story to Blumhouse behind his manager’s back. The Blumhouse executives took the meeting, and they politely told Zach that it was too sensitive a subject for them to pursue. Jason Kovac found out and promptly dropped Zach as a client.

Sometime later, I learned through a concerned mutual acquaintance that Zach was still working on the project. I could tell from his rare story posts that he'd lost a lot of weight and generally looked unwell. Out of some genuine fraternal concern, I reached out, and he reluctantly agreed to grab a coffee. All he wanted to talk about was the B-29 story and getting the movie made.

He'd written something like ten drafts over and over again, pounding at the pages with obsession. He told me that in his extensive research he had reached out to Dale Plambeck's grandchildren. To his distress, they’d told him over Facebook DM that they didn't want to talk and he shouldn't contact them again. At this, I found myself wondering how much he had confessed to them about his purported supernatural encounter. I imagine I'd be pretty pissed if some kook stranger told me that they were communing with my fallen relative.

Then he told me something that shocked me. Somehow, based off the success of his first movie and his latest draft of the B-29 script, he had found a Chinese financier willing to fund it for three million bucks. He told me that he was insisting on shooting on location in Japan, with American actors. I saw two problems with that, and I frankly let him know. First, Japan would eat up a huge chunk of his budget. Second, there was almost no chance that the Japanese government would let something like this move forward, especially with Chinese money behind it.

Zach reassured me that they had worked out an elaborate lie to convince the Japanese government to issue permits. He’d gone so far as to create an alternate script, one that gave a plausible reason for the costumes and locations while avoiding outright denigration of the Japanese Empire. That alternate script, of course, would never film. It was just a pretense to get the location rights.

After that coffee, I started checking on him every few weeks, both out of concern for his mental health and to see if he could actually pull off this insane scheme. Three times, the production almost fell apart, and he put up another hundred grand of his money from Hulu to get pre-production underway. Then, somehow, the pieces came together. The money from the Chinese financiers manifested, and the Japanese permits were approved. He was actually getting it done.

The next time I saw him was in Japan. I had a Tunisian friend over there living in a flat off her dad's international finance money, and she had convinced me to come and stay for a few weeks to try and get out of my head. It was not a hard sell with free accommodation, and the timing allowed me to see Zach’s production in action.

Four days into my trip, my jet lag wore off enough for me to take the bus north out of Tokyo and pay him a visit. To my surprise, he seemed good. He was calm and healthy. He had put on some muscle. The color was back in his face. He showed me the sets and the costumes, and for the first time I found myself legitimately jealous of what he was about to pull off. I knew from his alien abduction movie that he could tell a good story. It seemed, in addition to that, he possessed the miraculous power of being able to fundraise and organize.

Three weeks went by, and I had just extended my trip when I got a text from Ann Jones, his first assistant director. At first, it sounded like a prank. Zach had, according to Ann, gone missing after some sort of stunt went wrong and injured an actor. He was intermittently responding to texts, but refusing to say where he was, and everything was on hold while he remained AWOL.

For some reason, Ann had the idea that I might be able to convince him to get back to set. After five or six unanswered calls over twenty-four hours, he finally picked up and gave me oblique step-by-step instructions to meet him deep in the Japanese countryside. Doing my best to follow traffic law, I rented a car and found him, as promised, in a garage beneath some old woman's house a few miles off the freeway. He'd given her a lump of petty cash to let him crash there in panicked isolation.

Zach told me two preposterous, concerning things in the garage that afternoon. He was hunched against the back wall, covered in cobwebs, and I found it hard to hear him over the rain on the corrugated roof. Nevertheless I did my best to coax some sense from him.

I asked him first about the stunt that went wrong, and he told me that a rubber hacksaw on set had somehow been replaced with a real one, resulting in one of the American actors getting fairly badly slashed during a take. The actor was rushed to the hospital, and from what Anne had told me it seemed like he’d made a full recovery. That did nothing to console Zach. He considered himself personally responsible, which indeed he might have been, and he swore that there had been no real hacksaw present on set. He spoke of the swap as if it was some supernatural impossibility, like there was simply no way that it could have happened without both malice and superhuman sleight of hand.

The second thing he told me was about the airman’s ghost. According to Zach, he’d had a horrifying revelation the night before he fled the set. In trying to communicate with the tortured entity, he realized that it had never been Dale Plambeck at all. It was a yokai, he said, a malevolent Japanese spirit orchestrating this whole thing so it could delight in watching the suffering of the servicemen acted out all over again. All its appearances as Plambeck had been a cruel trick, nothing more. Zach screamed at me that whole production was only serving to torture the memory of the fallen Americans, at some point grabbing me by the shirt collar in desperation. He begged me to tell Ann that she had to stop the production, and with some cowardice I told him that I didn't have that authority.

I asked him why he had run, and he told me that the oni was hunting him, chasing him now that he knew of its existence. If it got hold of him, he told me with fright, he would never break free. He would be stuck for the rest of his life in some sadist nightmare of its creation.

I was more irritated than anything else. I had heard some weird excuses for stage fright in my day, but this by far took the cake. After hearing him out for a good hour, I made the mistake of trying to drag him into my car. In a panic, he threatened me with garden shears, pressing the rusted tip to my chest with such intensity in his eyes that I honestly thought I might be killed. Holding me at blade point, he made me promise not to tell Ann where I'd found him, and of course at blade point I agreed.

I was furious then, and I wanted nothing more than to be done with the whole affair. Back in Tokyo that night, I admitted to Ann over text that I had found him, and she convinced me to meet her for dinner to discuss the situation. I agreed mostly so I could rant about how Zach had gone off the deep end. When I got there, I saw that we were joined by two representatives from the Chinese financing company. The lead financier asked me in his limited English if I thought the film could be saved if they brought on a new director. For the sake of Ann and the rest of the crew’s employment, I probably should have said yes, but in that moment I honestly told him not to spend another dime. After that, nobody from the production contacted me again, and five days later I went home. I'm pretty sure they did what I said and scrapped the project completely.

I haven't seen Zach Dinesen since then. I sincerely hope he got the help he needed. I also hope that's the last time someone threatens me with garden shears. From what I hear, he's actually doing another movie set in Japan. It's set in the ‘80s, and he got his financing through some shady Korean hedge fund. The script came across my desk the other day with his byline and the working title Concrete Barrel Girl. I didn't read it, but I wish him the best, and it makes me optimistic that he's been able to find some peace. From what I hear, they go into production this spring.

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