A man tries to raise his two sons and two daughters under some of the most adverse conditions known to man. The father operates a horse-drawn cart, but in a city that is modernizing after the destruction of the Korean War, automobiles are making carts obsolete. The children are experiencing difficulties as well. The eldest son has flunked the bar exam twice and is not hopeful of passing it a third time to become a lawyer. The eldest daughter is mute and married to an abusive husband. The younger daughter tries to pose as a rich university student to move up in life. The youngest son has a penchant for petty theft.

A middle-aged man is so crazy about his mistress that he doesn't care about what happens to his family. The feud between his children by his wife and by the mistress gets worse until the family almost breaks apart.

At the close of the reign of Sin the Great in Goguryeo (B.C.37-A.D.668), royalist Uso is executed by a false incrimination made by a treacherous retainer Yangsin and his sister Jangssi. His daughter becomes a royal concubine of King Nammu, and called Her Majesty Yeonghwa. She revenges herself on the party of Yangsin. After the king passes away, she makes his brother Yeonu accede to the throne and has the whole country under her thumb. But she has no child. When the king begets a son from another woman, she dies of jealousy at last.

During the Joseon dynasty, the adviser Choi manages to place his natural son on the throne. His ambitions are upset by the appearance of Young-mun, a man whose parents he had killed.

Park, a bar owner, is forced into paying extortion money to the local gangsters. When Yong-cheol, a customer, sees this, he is outraged and tries to beat up the gangsters, but he is overwhelmed by their numbers. The gangsters cut off Yong-cheol's leg to teach him a lesson. Park and a young boy assist Yong-cheol in forging a new leg out of iron to use as a weapon to defeat the gangsters.

The newly installed radio transmitter using ultra sonic wavelengths has caused all corpses in the local cemeteries to rise up. The resurrected go on a rampage in a endless search for blood.

Jong Sil, a sound effects director, is awarded a carte blanche for his ingenious invention of a coke bottle opener sound used in a commercial film for an Arab client. Ecstatic, drunk, he heads home to his wife and kids, only to end up spending the night in an apartment unit one floor above which belongs to a single woman. The preposterous one-night-stand snowballs into a major event, for which he is reported gone missing on TV. Lost, Jong Sil becomes more involved with the woman, discovering things about her, as their relationship takes an unexpected turn.

Yong-cheol and Su-na help Hun to take revenge on the men who killed his parents, but anytime they kill one of the murderers, they hear a ghostly, melancholy harmonica.