The 1970s and 1980s still represent the pinnacle of sensationalist cinema. It was the era of grindhouse, the video nasties and Stanley Kubrick’s enduringly controversial A Clockwork Orange. It was also the era that saw most of the great horror films being made, with directors like Dario Argento, George A. Romero and David Cronenberg at their peak.

Nostalgia for this era is a significant driving force behind the latest wave of sensationalist films. Quentin Tarantino, who must have digested more of this type of film than anybody else in the industry, is something of a figurehead. His classic films are not short of violence, but it was his 2007 project, Grindhouse, co-produced by Robert Rodriguez, that spawned a popular revival of the exploitation genre. Rodriguez’s own Machete and Jason Eisener’s Hobo with a Shotgun are among the films Grindhouse spawned, starting as fake trailers made to be shown alongside it. Like Grindhouse, both pay homage to exploitation films and revel in its violent excess.

Drive is another film saturated in nostalgia, and is more significant due to its originality and quality – Nicholas Winding Refn was, after all, named best director at Cannes. Refn dedicated the film to the controversial visionary Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose best work came in the 1970s and 1980s. While their filmmaking styles are worlds apart, Refn claims that Drive contains some of Jodorowsky’s existentialism. Drive is slick, superbly directed and stars one of the best leading men in the business, Ryan Gosling. He, along with his co-star Carey Mulligan, have contributed greatly to its popularity. It is not otherwise clear how the film would have done quite so well. It plays out like a 1980s B-movie, heavily stylised with a low-key plot. Its violence is less frequent but no more restrained than that of the Grindhouse flicks, and is all the more unsettling for it.

Sensationalist film-making can also be used for more serious purposes, and a string of important directors have recently ventured into the territory. Pedro Almodóvar, with The Skin I Live In, and Lars von Trier, with Antichrist, place extreme sexual violence and mutilation at the heart of their respective films. In The Skin I Live In, the themes are used to explore the fundamental meaning of identity. The central revelation will leave you sick to your stomach, but the moral ambiguity that Almodóvar maintains until the end is perhaps equally disturbing. Antichrist is an exceptionally dark film, which can be viewed as an allegory of absolute negation. It notoriously caused several people to faint during its premiere at Cannes and contains scenes shocking enough to make even the most desensitised viewer squirm.

However, artistry is not always prominent in sensationalist film-making, and the revival of torture films in the past decade illustrates that. With some exceptions, notably the extraordinary French-Canadian film Martyrs, the genre tends towards crude exhibitionism. To paraphrase Romero, it lacks metaphor. Tom Six is currently the main protagonist with his Human Centipede films, the second of which takes the term "torture porn" to its logical extreme. It was initially refused classification by the BBFC, although a cut version has now been granted an 18 certificate. Six, customarily undeterred, promises the sequel will make the first look “like a Disney film.” His style is sensationalism for its own sake, elemental transgression, a marketing tool in itself.

That should not put you off sensationalist cinema. It is essential for exploring, and attempting to reproduce, the extremes of experience. It gives power to themes which would otherwise remain underdeveloped. And, as with the grindhouse revival, it can be a great deal of fun.