We’ve discovered the source of filmmaker Edgar Wright’s comedy, and it’s not just the rampantly filthy LPs Peter Cook and Dudley Moore made in the ’70s.

“Probably the first time I ever heard the C-word was listening to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Derek and Clive albums, which are three master classes in swearing,” Wright recalls during a lively call to the Straight from a Toronto hotel room. “I remember listening to those albums when I was a 14-year-old and thinking it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard.”

Collaborating once again with actor Simon Pegg (his own Pete or Dud, depending), Wright deploys the dreaded C-word to hilarious effect in their newest film, The World’s End (opening Friday [August 23]). It’s something only the Brits can get away with for some reason, the fucking cunts (“I’m fully aware of that!” Wright bellows down the phone), but British humour tends to travel well. So well that Wright can pretty much make the same film three times and we still can’t get enough.

As in their 2004 smash Shaun of the Dead, Pegg and his erstwhile acting mate Nick Frost are being pursued in The World’s End by hordes of scary, inhuman things. Robots from space, specifically—a situation that starts innocently enough when five old friends, led by sad middle-aged waster Gary King (Pegg), reconvene for an epic pub crawl in their old hometown.

But why does this keep happening? What is about Wright that makes his movies so paranoid? The answer lies in 2007’s Hot Fuzz, his second film, in which Pegg and Frost are hunted by an entire town of Satanists.

“Here’s a funny thing,” he explains. “My mum is a big conspiracy theorist and when I was younger, in that way where you automatically take the opposite view to your parents because you’re a sullen and idiotic teenager, when my mother would come out with wild conspiracies about our hometown, I would just, like, formally reject it. She had so many stories of, like, conspiracy—and some of them very real in terms of corruption and gangsters, and some of them a lot more fanciful, like the idea that there might be unicorns and aliens on Glastonbury Tor. But when I was writing Hot Fuzz, I said to my mother, I said, ‘I want you to write down all the stories that you heard about our town and give it to me.’ ”

The result? “A 50-page document called ‘Spooky Doings,’ ” Wright recalls with a big laugh. “It was almost this kind of James Ellroy–ish tome. But I think my mum was so happy that I’d embraced the conspiracy theorist in her.”

Wright hasn’t completely committed to mum’s world-view. He sees the monstrous other in The World’s End as “a very extreme actualization of the fear of change”, but all gonzo metaphors and spooky doings aside, the film has something to say about the relative value of real community over the illusions presented by technology and progress—something that assaults the viewer in the film’s shockingly blunt epilogue. This might be the real Edgar Wright percolating through all the postapocalyptic smoke and ashes.

“It’s funny,” he says.”Many people have said to us, ‘Oh, this has the bleakest ending of any of the three.’ And me and Simon—we vehemently disagree. We think it’s the happiest ending of the three.”