Aokigahara forest sits at the base of Mt. Fuji, dense enough that authorities can only sweep it for bodies once a year. VICE's crew walks into the woods with search parties and volunteers who track the missing, filming markers, abandoned tents, and the trail tape people leave behind before they die. The forest gained its reputation after Seicho Matsumoto's 1960 novel Kuroi Jukai ended with a young lover's suicide there, and deaths climbed afterward to an estimated 50 to 100 a year, though the site's association with death predates the book, reaching back to accounts of ubasute, the abandonment of the elderly, in the 19th century. One of the film's grimmer threads follows claims that the Yakuza pays homeless men to slip into the forest ahead of the annual patrol and rob corpses before they're found. Interviews with patrol members and local residents fill in the folklore of hauntings that keeps some people out and, apparently, draws others in.