7 Movies That Stole Their Plot From Comic Books

When Spanish comic book writer El Torres got wind of the 2016 Jason Zada directed horror The Forest he was struck by its likeness to his 2011 graphic novel El Bosque de los Suicidas or The Suicide Forest.

Both feature American protagonists who travel to Japan’s infamous Aokigahara forest – one of the world’s most frequented suicide spots – in search of lost loved ones who may have killed themselves and come up against some of Japanese folklore’s most fearsome of ghosts, the vengeful yūrei.

One might argue that as a real-life location the Aokigahara forest is fair game for any artist to draw inspiration from and that its sad and spooky reputation only makes it more ripe for the picking. And to be fair, neither The Suicide Forest nor The Forest are the first to feature Aokigahara – many other manga, books and films have too.

But as El Torres told Spanish media, it wasn’t just that The Forest shared the same setting and plot as his book but a similar aesthetic too. Of course, it didn’t help that the film was released in Spain under the title El Bosque de los Suicidios which is ridiculously close to the comic’s Spanish title.

And funnily enough, one of The Forest’s producers is none other than comic book writer and self-professed graphic novel nerd David S. Goyer. Maybe El Torres is right – Goyer could easily have done a little idea mining while flipping through a copy of The Suicide Forest and oh-so conveniently forgot to mention it.