An ultra-violent South Korean revenge thriller may have partly inspired the Virginia Tech massacre, it emerged today.

In videos that he posted to NBC News in New York on the day he shot and killed 32 people, Cho Heung Sui imitates two distinctive images from Oldboy, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004.

The South Korean-born student depicts himself wielding a hammer in imitation of the film’s hero, who embarks on a murderous rampage against the people who held him captive for 15 years and destroyed his life.

Elsewhere in the videos, which were shot over six days, Cho holds a gun to his head, copying another scene from the film.

Detectives believe that he watched Oldboy repeatedly in the build-up to the shootings.

Korean cinema has built a strong critical and commercial following in the West in recent years.

Oldboy, directed by Chan Wook Park, was hailed as an existentialist masterpiece by some reviewers on its release. Others were disgusted by the extreme level of violence and a scene where a live octopus is eaten on camera. Unhappy schooldays play a role in the plot.

In an interview with The Times in 2004, its star, Min Sik Choi described his character as “the loneliest, most miserable character on Earth... like a dry wooden block with only revenge on his mind and nothing else, not even emotion.”

Unexpectedly the character’s killing spree helps him to become more human, he added, “like moss growing on a wooden block after it gets wet."

Nick James, the editor of Sight and Sound, the film magazine, said: “Oldboy is a very, very distinctive film and the most highly regarded of the films now labelled Asian Extreme cinema but it is also so ludicrously over the top that no sane person could mistake it for reality.”

Other cultural clues to Cho’s state of mind were being furiously debated on the internet today. Another pose in the NBC media package, which shows him holding guns in both hands, recalls both the films of the Hong Kong action director, John Woo, and a publicity shot of the actor Laurence Fishburne, used to promote The Matrix: Reloaded in 2003. The title of a play attributed to Cho, Mr Brownstone, is the title of an early Guns n’ Roses song about heroin abuse.

Similar speculation linked the perpetrators of the Columbine High School Massacre in 1999 to The Matrix, The Basketball Diaries and Heathers among other films. Bob Cesca, a film maker blogging on the Huffington Post website today dismissed the connection between Oldboy and Monday's atrocity as “the most ridiculous hypothesis yet.”

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