Darren, sales manager at a plastics firm in Milton Keynes, is a force to be reckoned with in the British film industry. In part, he’s the reason why British crime cinema – low-budget, morally dubious and about as disreputable as it’s ever been – is the genre that refuses to die. At least, Darren would if he actually existed. Darren, it turns out, is a theoretical construct; an audience archetype identified by Jezz Vernon, managing director of distribution outfit Metrodome, the people who released recent examples of the form such as The Guvnors, St George’s Day and The Fall of the Essex Boys.

“We always talk about the buyer of a film,” says Vernon. “For someone like Darren, there’s a certain boredom about his existence, and the attraction to gangsters or football hooligans has a certain aspirational element to it. It might sound worrying, but we liken it to music: the mainstream in UK music has always liked poetic thugs, from Byron to Liam Gallagher. People like the paradox; both the masculinity of it, and the denial of it.”

These are the films about top boys and bent cops, where blaggers are tooled up and hard men mugged off. Poster artwork invariably spotlights major-league violence: either a massive ruck, or heavy weaponry, or both. Largely London-based – and more specifically, the eastern half of the capital, stretching out to the Essex suburbs, they are suffused with suppressed rage and a fierce commitment to clan honour. Vernon points out that the hooligan movie is, as a micro-genre, distinct from the gangster movie, but they are connected by “very tribal, geographically based consenting violence between two opposing groups”. Many films, however, force a connection between the two, with the likes of The Rise and Fall of a White Collar Hooligan making a direct link between football terrace shit-kickery and large scale organised crime. The auteurs of this world are people such as Nick Love and Julian Gilbey; it nourishes its own acting stable with the likes of Frank Harper, Alan Ford and Craig Fairbrass.

Vinnie Jones in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Photograph: Allstar/HANDMADE FILMS/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

The existence of a solid, hardcore audience who keep watching means that, on some level, this is a self-perpetuating, self-funding sector; evidence in its rawest form that a British film industry does indeed exist. They don’t get anywhere near state-disbursed funding, and nor, you suspect, would they want to. In some cases, the figures are staggering: two of the original hooligan films, Green Street and The Football Factory, sold well over a million DVDs each, while The Business, the 80s-set Costa del Crime saga that shot Danny Dyer to fame in 2005, shifted more than 800,000. Not every film can achieve that, and Vernon says that DVD sales have declined rapidly in the past year or two; but even a small-scale release, such as the Glasgow-set The Wee Man, can muster 100,000.

That makes the economics of the low-budget crime movie attractive even if, as Vernon is the first to admit, “they don’t export well”. The culturally specific argot, the narrowly British concern with football, and the genre’s fascination with certain key crimes – notably the notorious Rettendon murders in 1995 – mean that unlike other areas of the British film industry, little concession is made to what overseas audiences, particularly in the US, will make of it all.

Quite why the Rettendon murders, in which three drug dealers were found shot dead in a Range Rover in a small village near Chelmsford, exerts such a grip on film-makers’ imaginations is bit of a puzzle: by Vernon’s count, eight films have been made about it, including Essex Boys, Rise of the Footsoldier, Fall of the Essex Boys and Bonded by Blood. Other “clusters” in the genre include the recent tweak in which older-generation hoolies and hard men scrap with hoodie-wearing youngsters, a clash-of-subcultures hybrid amplified in The Guvnors and We Still Kill the Old Way.

But what distinguishes these films from the cheap-and-cheerful thrillers of earlier, hokier eras is the sense that, somehow, they bear the imprint of the real thing. Authenticity is the watchword; the current flood of films was anticipated by, and to a large extent based on memoirs published by a media-literate generation of lawbreakers, anxious to secure what Vernon refers to their “legacy”. It is a central irony that the trigger for it all, the door-opener if you like, was the arrival in the late 90s and early 2000s of “mockney” films such as Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and Love Honour and Obey, in which Primrose Hill types rubbed shoulders with proper hard-men such as Lenny McLean. Since then, the films have, in general, got more dour, nastier, and more self-justifying, if equally celebratory.

The Fall of the Essex Boys. PR Photograph: PR

A key player in all this is Cass Pennant, a former member of West Ham’s infamous Inter City Firm, who turned his dramatic life story into, first, a memoir – called Cass – and then a film, also called Cass, released in 2008. Now 57, and still a physically imposing figure, Pennant is set up as a film producer, operating from a room above a pub just off Great Portland Street in London’s West End. Pennant’s credibility with what he calls “the in-crowd” (not, it’s safe to say, the bearded asymmetrical haircut types) means he is regularly called on as an on-set consultant, as well as to act as a negotiator between film-makers and the hard-men they want to involve in their movies.

Pennant says his film-making activities go all the way back to The Firm, Alan Clarke’s ground-breaking hooligan film starring Gary Oldman, for which he acted as an uncredited adviser. But his real reverence, and acknowledgement of a foot in the film-making door, is reserved for documentary-maker Ian Stuttard. Pennant says Stuttard agreed to spend a year gaining the gang’s trust before they allowed him to complete the now-seminal Hooligan in 1985. (“He got footage no one could ever dream of getting.”) Pennant got his first taste of film-making by demanding a seat in the editing room (“certain faces couldn’t be seen”). On the back of his book success – and eight subsequent titles, including Top Boys: True Stories of Football’s Hardest Men and 30 Years of Hurt: A History of England’s Hooligan Army – Pennant first set up a publishing imprint and then began trying to interest the film industry in his stories. He had a brush with Guy Ritchie (Pennant and his co-writer Neil Bowers sued Ritchie over contributions to the script for Snatch, and settled out of court), before getting Cass off the ground and a credit as co-producer.

He invested a lot of effort in The Guvnors, easing the way for a scene that featured a gathering of former streetfighters: to the uninitiated, it looks like a group of ordinary middle-aged men watching a football game, but in fact they are veteran top boys from Hartlepool, Nottingham, Birmingham, and of course, West Ham. Twenty years ago there would be no chance of them being in the same room without chairs flying, but these days passions are somewhat spent. Even so, Pennant still has to phone ahead to warn “a city” he is coming up for a meeting.

Pennant, and presumably his in-crowd compadres, sees the films as a way of preserving the values and reinforcing the mythology of a certain era – “respect” is a word that still gets bandied around a lot – but, interestingly, for him race is not a foreground issue. He is much more concerned with the class barriers that, in his view, corral the film industry for the well off. “Film is purely owned by the middle classes. Only the middle classes can make the films, but they can’t have those lives. They belong to the working classes. The stories belong to the East End. It’s like a marriage.”

The Wee Man … Scottish gangster style. PR Photograph: PR

The 50 or so titles that Pennant issued as a publisher – a considerable chunk of which are other hardman testimonies – now act as leverage for Pennant’s move into production. His company, called Urban Edge (Stuttard is his partner) released its first effort in 2011. Not unsurprisingly, it was a youth-culture documentary called Casuals, which played to Pennant’s two main strengths: 80s street fashion and football violence. He does, however, have bigger ideas: emphasising that Cass was as much about “identity” as violence, he is planning a film about the 2Tone movement, through the story of a mixed-race girl who, oddly enough, ended up running with a terrace gang.

Could this be an indication that the British crime thriller is running out of legs – or, at least, is looking to adapt to survive? Other recent examples – such as the Andrew Hulme-directed Snow in Paradise – have tried to recalibrate it, by introducing more spiritual elements and calling attention to the genre’s not-entirely-invisible racism. This week, another low-budget number, Hackney’s Finest, aims to do a Tarantino on the British drugs thriller – again, based on real life material. (The writer, Thorin Seex, was discovered by director Chris Bouchard in his mum’s writing group.) In some ways, Hackney’s Finest is the absolute opposite to the likes of Cass; Bouchard’s background as a VFX artist at the Framestore effects house means the film has a surface flash few others could manage, and the film has a bloodsoaked, black-comic tone that is fundamentally unserious. (Plus Bouchard is an unlikely figure to be trying this sort of hyperviolent, gun-infested malarkey: a soft-spoken type, he’s best known for the Tolkien fan film The Hunt for Gollum, which went viral in 2009.)

But there is a connection there: the hard-men thrillers that Pennant promotes, and Vernon sells, are fan films themselves, in a way. The intimate relationships between the subjects and participants, mean they operate as both description and fantasy: they both simultaneously criticise and glamorise – which you suspect, deep down, is the way Darren likes it.

Hackney’s Finest is on release from today.