After Dark Horrorfest sounded like a good idea - take eight independent horror films that deserve to be seen and given them theatrical distribution. Launched in 2006 by the Canadian filmmaker Courtney Solomon (An American Haunting), the annual event has unfortunately devolved into a weeklong s**tfest. Every year I go, hoping the festival will build on the promise of its initial run, which showcased some solid fright flicks like The Abandoned and Wicked Little Things. And every year I go home sorely disappointed.

The festival usually features at least one Asian import, and that's what I went to see at this year's festival, which ran Jan. 9-15. (All eight titles of Horrorfest III will be released on DVD on March 31.) This South Korean film was actually released a few years ago as Someone Behind You before After Dark Films bought it and renamed it Voices. Directed by Oh Ki-hwan, the movie is a K-horror (short for Korean horror, just like J-horror is short for Japanese horror) head-scratcher that quickly wears out its welcome.

Some kind of supernatural curse (or whatever) is causing people to go all glassy-eyed and brutally murder their friends and family. The curse has singled out teenager Ka-in (Yun Jin-seo, who also appeared in Park Chan-wook's masterpiece Oldboy), who has to fend off attackers both at school and at home. Given that the murders arise from petty jealousies, the school scenes play better than the household scenes. At school, at least we get to see the girls fighting in their school uniforms. The murders have an almost satirical edge in the way they evoke the high school caste system. But the domestic scenes make no sense. They lack the psychological elements that made Kubrick's The Shining and George Ratliff's little-seen Joshua so powerful.

I love the innocent, almost s*xless romance Ka-in has with her boyfriend. You have to hand it to Ki-Whan and Korean filmmakers in general: they sure know how to mix the sour with the sweet. Some of the images in the film stick with you, like when a pool of blood collects on Ka-in's bedroom ceiling. But none of it means anything, and the dialogue is ridiculous. Ka-in has a habit of reassuring people, "Don't worry, I won't die." (Oh, you just know she will!) And don't even get me started on the skinless man-blob that pops up every once in a while and remains totally unexplained.

K-horror and J-horror films often throw logic out the window, and that's fine until you stop getting scared, leaving you free to pick apart the plot. The main reason Voices stops being scary is because there aren't enough teenagers in it for the filmmakers to knock off. Slasher movies rely on one-dimensional teenagers to go investigate weird noises. (See Scream.) In Voices, Ga-in is the focus of nearly every scene, and therefore she's the one who keeps getting attacked. This wrongheaded approach leeches the slasher scenes of suspense, because we know she's going to survive until the final reel.

All in all it was another disappointing year at After Dark Horrorfest. I could have stayed and watched Butterfly Effect: Revelation, the sequel to Butterfly Effect 2, but I decided I had better things to do, like clean out my wallet and pay my taxes.