Wayan Brothers interview

THE BROTHERS GRIM

The three Wayans brothers, Marlon, Shawn and Keenen Ivory have their own way of knowing whether their low-brow horror parody movies work. They show it to their mother and if she's incensed, they have a hit.

The Wayans turned the small budget anything-for-a-laugh Scary Movie into a 300 million dollar worldwide hit. So they're hoping for a repeat of this box office surprise with the sequel Scary Movie 2.

"Our mom stormed out during the orgasm scene in Scary Movie, so we hope she'll hate this one even more," says Marlon, 28, cheerfully. "Then we know we'll have a hit."

The three American brothers write, direct and star in their own productions. While the first Scary Movie parodied teen slasher movies, the sequel does the same to more traditional horror movies. It's gross, often silly and includes ever-escalating outrageousness, but 43-year-old Keenen Ivory, who directs the films, says people shouldn't get upset.

"It's really hard to take this stuff seriously. A lot of it is sexual but it's not offered up that way. It's just body parts, gross kind of stuff."

They know exactly who their target audience is. "It's the teenage and university crowd so we give them lots of sex jokes and gross humour," explains Keenen Ivory.

He didn't want to do just a repeat of the first either, which made fun of films like Scream. "We pretty much exhausted the teen slasher flicks so we decided to take a run at the classic horror films with Scary Movie 2. We decided to use The Haunting as the centrepiece."

Getting ideas involved watching over 160 horror movies, especially hits of the genre like The Exorcist.

"We also do nods to Charlie's Angels and Mission Impossible because they are popular with our fan base."

Before Scary Movie the brothers had enjoyed assorted levels of individual success as TV actors and stand-up comedians appearing together in various combinations in Hollywood Shuffle, I'm Gonna Get You Sucker and Mo' Money. Largely brought up in the Chelsea area of Manhattan, the three plus their seven siblings, Dwayne, Deirdre, Damon, Kim, Elvira, Nadia and Devon had an impoverished childhood for which comedy provided a means of escape.

Although Keenen became a comedian first, television audiences were first exposed to the Wayan family through the 90s comedy show In Living Colour.