Kim Jee-woon's I Saw the Devil is only the latest revenge fable to hit the world from the studios of Seoul. Why all the anger?

Next month, South Korean director Kim Jee-woon's new film, I Saw the Devil, is released on these shores. It's a bloody revenge fable, bulging with 360-degree stab-cams, decapitations and lines like, "Your nightmare is only beginning." Tough stuff, to be sure, and aficionados of the rough street justice favoured by a certain strain of Asian cinema are in for a treat.

So why is it that such gory stories of vengeance have become – to western eyes at least – the dominant feature of Korean cinema? Kim himself contributed to the genre in 2005 with A Bittersweet Life, and there's Park Chan-wook's phenomenal revenge trilogy (Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Lady Vengeance and Oldboy); and, though they're not driven at their cores by revenge, it would be foolish to disregard the baroque bloodletting of films like Lee Myung-se's Nowhere to Hide and Na Hong-jin's The Chaser.

It's tempting to say the massive international success of Park's Oldboy was what spurred the Korean revenge boom, in the same way that Inception is already casting a shadow over American action movies. When Oldboy scooped silverware at Cannes and landed on a million student DVD shelves, its plot became a tempting template for enterprising producers to employ. The South Korean film industry – buoyed by the economics of the country's famed quota system, which compels cinemas to show homegrown movies, and new opportunities for venture capital following the 1997 Asian financial crisis – had a true global hit.

But Oldboy did not itself create the violent revenge trope. It was a major tendency in South Korean cinema well before Oh Dae-su's 2003 romp around Seoul. Why?

Let's stay with Oldboy for a second. If you haven't seen it, the film is about a man kidnapped seemingly without reason, held for 15 years, then released and given five days to find out why. Look at the dates: Oldboy was released in 2003, meaning the original abduction took place in 1988. That was the year South Korea's first democratic president was inaugurated, after their first elections in December the previous year.

South Korea may look like a lovely place to live these days, but its transition to democracy was not a smooth one. In 1996, two former presidents were indicted for crimes committed in office, with one even sentenced to death – though both were pardoned the following year. A great deal of social anger was and is directed at business leaders, most of whom stayed quiet and got wealthy while the earlier regime was shooting students in the streets. In 1979, President Park Chung-hee was assassinated after 16 years in power in a failed bid for democracy. Further back, of course, there's the wounds of the division of the Korean peninsula and the nightmarish war that followed.

With all this suffering, and the ever-present threat just to the north, South Korea's progress has been a miracle – but it hasn't been without its cost. The South Koreans may have kept calm and carried on getting rich, but it seems impossible to lug around all that history without some of its brutal energy manifesting itself. Hence, perhaps, these grandly bloody vengeances: you can read Oldboy many ways, but it's hard not to see protagonist Oh as an incarnation of the fury this history has bequeathed. Imprisoned since a key turning point in the nation's history, he personifies repressed rage escaping and wreaking grisly havoc.

Most interestingly – spoiler alert – the ending of Oldboy hinges on an act of forgetting. The damage the past can do has been glimpsed, and even its perpetrator is horrified. Too defeated to confront it, all he can do is make an ambiguously successful attempt to wipe it from his memory. It was a similar act of cultural forgetting that prompted the rise of revenge in South Korean cinema – the genre that, however domestically successful its melodramas and comedies, has built its international reputation.