Like many movie houses, the Museum of the Moving Image approached Hallowe’en with more traditional Western-type scary movies. In conjunction with the Korea Society and Subway Cinema, and unlike everywhere else, the Astoria, Queens, venue followed up with four days of six unusual features by four directors -- five actually, with siblings Beom–sik and Sik preferring to go as the Jung Brothers -- in “See It Big! The Korean Horror Picture Show.”

K-horror has surged these last dozen years and offers a contrast to the J-horror niche which latter not infrequently connects its evil-slash-supernatural to media technology in place of Japan’s traditional outsize monsters. Seoul’s, on the other hand, runs more to themes of human vengeance and flashes more ultra-violence and torture porn. “Basically, I’m throwing out the question, “When is violence justified?’” rationalizes writer-director Park Chan-wook, represented by two revenger flicks right up there with the Elizabethans’ Revenge Tragedy Theatre of Blood.

Park’s celebrated Oldboy -- not the pale James Brolin copy but the Cannes 2003 Palme d’Or -- is not here, but the first and last of its Vengeance Trilogy companions are. Rumored ready for remaking with Charlize Theron, the concluding 2005 Lady Vengeance somewhat resembles that 2003 predecessor Oldboy but with a woman (Lee Young-ae) as the seeker of blood-filled retribution for false imprisonment, blackmail and the kidnapping of her daughter.

Kick-starter of the Trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance/Boksuneun naui geot (2002) sprawls at 129 minutes and loses steam and its own sometimes humor, changing its center-of-focus in an ending of at best ambiguous sympathies. Hair dyed green-blue, deaf-mute Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun) works in a foundry section, cohabits with childhood friend-girlfriend and sign-language adept anti-capitalist activist Cha Young-mi (Bae Doona) and cares for his dialysis-dependent dying sister (Lim Ji-eun). Their blood types different, he cannot donate and is bamboozled of his savings and his own kidney by a mother and her two goon sons who run a most unsterile black market organ ring.

In a series of at-first comic events, he and Young-mi kidnap for ten million won ransom the young daughter of divorced single father Park Dong-jin (Song Kang-ho), the rich Ilshin Electronics head who has just fired Ryu. What starts out as no violence class consciousness degenerates into Grand Guignol splatter. Things whirl out of everyone’s control as both male protagonists lose humanity in each becoming “Mr. Vengeance”: jokily titled “President” Park, who kills for understandable reasons in spite of his essential goodness, and Ryu who slaughters for understandable reasons but loses our title-sympathy. “I know you’re a good guy. But you know why I have to kill you? Huh? Right?”

The physicality of the violence, too, spirals beyond control --drownings, a mentally defective spastic (Ryu Seung-beom), rape, knifings, drugs, aluminum bat bashings first perfected on a batting range, electric torture, autopsies, cremations, loosened bladders.

A similar descent into revenge gore, justified or not, characterizes Kim Jee-woon’s 2010 cat-and-mouse I Saw the Devil/Akmareul boatda, its hunted-hunter psychopath played by Oldboy and Lady Vengeance’s Choi Min-sik. Seven years before that, Kim’s A Tale of Two Sisters/Janghwa, Hongryeon scored as, and still remains, the highest grossing but not all that gross K-horror film ever. Though derived from a national folktale, this one has a foreign feel in that horror comes from dread of what lies around the corner rather than rivers of viscera. While this series-closer is set in a Gothic mountain house with creaking wooden floors and doors, the sinister evil is an externalization of sister Bae Soo-mi’s (Lim Su-jeong) obsessional resentment of stepmother Eun-joo (Yum Jung-ah).

Also relying for structure on a building and wood interiors is the Jungs’ Epitaph/Gidam, a 2007 omnibus in the mold of 1972 Asylum (reissued as House of Crazies). Once a state-of-the-art hospital, Ansaeng (Safe Life) is to be demolished, and guilt-ridden over two wives’ successive early deaths, elderly doctor Masao Takaki (Jin Ku) reminisces inside the derelict building, calling up his internship there during World War II Japanese occupation.

In visually old-fashioned tone, three supernatural episodes haphazardly flash back and overlap but grow confusing, more satisfying as mood pieces than coherent story. They come and go, beginning with young intern Park Jung-nam (Jin ku again), intended by the woman who has raised him to marry her returning daughter but himself quietly attracted to an oddly behaving female corpse in the morgue, maybe a victim of a botched double suicide.

A much younger girl, a child really, Asako (Ko Ku-yeon) is not dead but semi-catatonic in the psychiatric section. She is traumatized as the survivor of the car crash which she caused and which claimed the lives of her blood-on-white-dress-and-snow mother (Park Ji-a) and the stepfather Koshiri Ojni, played by David McInnis) whom the daughter desired for her own. Having suffered a similar loss when young, Dr Lee Su-in (Lee Dong-kyu) is drawn to this girl he is helping but is senselessly run down by a trolley.

Thirdly, there is a serial knife-killer of soldiers, Japanese except for one young Korean. Brilliant husband and wife doctors Kim Dong-won and Kineda In-yeong (Kim Tae-woo and Kim Bo-kyeong) are aiding the Japanese Major’s (Kim Eung-su) investigation, but their characters grow confusing, and confused, in what seems intended as subsumed or double or split personalities. Switching back and forth between them, and among the three tales all together, Epitaph loses itself and the viewer. Less, or fewer, would have been more.

(Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is released by Tartan Films and rated "R" for strong gruesome violence, strong sensuality, language and drug use.)