Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975) revolves around a smuggled sculpture that exists on a continuum somewhere between The Exorcist’s excavated Assyrian totem and the Maltese Falcon: a valuable, cursed antique that turns out to be the stuff that nightmares are made of. Like Chinatown, Penn’s film is a neonoir scribbled in indelible ink, with a cloud of encroaching blackness gradually blotting out the sky on both coasts. There’s a determinedly panoramic sprawl to Alan Sharp’s screenplay, which keeps shifting the action back and forth from gleaming, sun-blind Los Angeles—the prowling grounds for Gene Hackman’s hamstrung football-star turned PI Harry Moseby, a laconic brother shamus to Jake Gittes and Philip Marlowe—to a swampy outcropping of the Florida Keys, where a jailbait heiress has absconded to either visit her stepfather or seduce her mothers’ other lovers . . . or both. Incest remains at the level of subtext (“the world is getting smaller, the kids are getting younger, and I’m getting drunk”), but corruption, coercion, and subterfuge ooze from the story’s every pore.

Penn’s chosen style is much slower and more deliberate than Howard Hawks’s serene velocity in The Big Sleep (1946)—and some shots hold long enough to “watch paint dry,” as per Harry’s priceless, tossed-off critique of/stealth encomium to Eric Rohmer—but it cultivates a similar sense of perpetual, in media res confusion, of endlessly unfolding exposition that explains everything except what’s actually going on. A half-decade before Blow Out (1981), Penn wrings a sinister variation on the Zapruder film via footage of a movie-set car crash that suggests not only an act of behind-the-scenes sabotage claiming the life of a supporting character, but, more widely, a booby-trapped reality. The bloody coup de grâce, meanwhile, is delivered by another, larger vehicle, a horrific act of death from above as the MacGuffin disappears beneath the waves, as lost to the ages as the treasure of the Sierra Madre or all those crisp bills scattered to the wind at the end of The Killing (1956).

Both Chinatown and Night Moves make a determined show of trailing off, of punctuating tragic revelations with slippery ellipses, the former through a wobbly tracking shot that loses sight of its subject, the latter in a long view of a damaged boat tracing figure eights along the ocean’s surface into infinity. Without closure, there can be no catharsis, but some of the strongest neonoirs of the early eighties take a less open-ended approach; they lock into place like iron maidens around their hapless protagonists, fine-tuned mechanisms in an era of high-concept studio engineering. It’s telling that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s right-hand man Lawrence Kasdan, the cowriter of The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), was keen to try his hand at another old-school homage, and also that he tried to reinject some of the sexiness that had become neutered in the surrounding blockbuster deluge. In Body Heat (1981)—set, like Night Moves, in Florida mid-heat-wave—William Hurt’s inept lawyer gets warned about “following his dick into a very big hassle.” He ends up in jail for a murder he didn’t commit in lieu of the one he did (a comeuppance copped by the Coens for The Man Who Wasn’t There); meanwhile, confidence woman Kathleen Turner fulfills her high-school-yearbook ambition to “be rich and live in an exotic land.”

Kasdan’s satisfying, putatively progressive girl-on-top scenario deviated significantly from the seventies sacrificial-femme template (and generated reams of academic discourse as a result), while De Palma’s Blow Out ends, much like Chinatown, with the scream of an innocent woman slain on the altar of an upwardly mobile (and spiderily all-encompassing) conspiracy. There will be no forgetting for John Travolta’s soundman, however: his mythic punishment will be to hear her scream over and over, wrecking his own soul on the rocks of the siren’s call; it’s as if De Palma were trying to show Polanski what downbeat really looks like. The one rousing semi-exception to 1981’s roundelay of unhappy endings—a movie with catharsis to burn—is Ivan Passer’s Santa-Barbara-set Cutter’s Way, about a paranoid, disabled Vietnam vet played by John Heard who takes arms against a sea of troubles—and aim at a monstrous, all-consuming local tycoon—by briefly adopting the iconography of the old West. Cutter doesn’t survive his brief, glorious bout of John Wayne cosplay, but his best pal, Bone (Jeff Bridges), shows true grit by pulling the trigger in his stead—a replay of the ending of The Long Goodbye torqued more toward cosmic justice than individual retribution.

The winking self-consciousness of Kasdan, the Coens, and De Palma would slough toward the nineties and be reborn in the mainstream breakthrough of Quentin Tarantino, whose rough beast Reservoir Dogs (1992) owed so many debts all over town—to Joseph H. Lewis, Phil Karlson, Stanley Kubrick, John Boorman, Jean-Luc Godard (via Joseph McBride), and Ringo Lam—that only the genuine windfall of Pulp Fiction (1994), totaling some $200 million in box office and an unlimited ATM’s worth of cultural capital, kept him from accusations of bankruptcy. QT’s great innovation going forward would be to turn counterfeiting into a viable form of cinematic currency, but as far as neonoirs go, a more viable—and affordable—candidate for the decade’s reigning specialist would be the Montana-born John Dahl, a punk rocker turned music-video-director-for-hire who achieved a nifty synthesis of Jim Thompson and Jacques Tourneur in 1989’s Kill Me Again en route to bigger buzz for Red Rock West (1993), which pitted Nicholas Cage’s curb-dwelling drifter Michael against a victory-lapping Dennis Hopper and completed the Lynchian trifecta with a smoldering Lara Flynn Boyle.

The female lead in Dahl’s follow-up, The Last Seduction, would be one for the ages: a shape-shifting, chain-smoking force of nature named Bridget Gregory, played by Linda Fiorentino with a sexy, unrepentant malevolence. Structurally, Dahl’s movie is a master class in double-crosses, with Bridget’s unique facility for mirror-writing serving nicely for a character who knows both sides of every angle (and how to play both sides against the middle). Philosophically, it unfurls as a riff on the line in Body Heat where Turner sizes up Hurt and queries, not-so-rhetorically, “You’re not too smart, are you? I like that in a man.”

Bridget, meanwhile, has an opportunistically love-hate relationship with stupidity, and the unmitigated contempt she evinces for the brain-dead fraternity of cheats, philanderers, himbos, and flat-out pushovers she schemes and scythes her way through grim-reaper-style from New York to Buffalo (rendered unglamorously by Dahl and cinematographer Jeff Jur) gives The Last Seduction its jaggedly feminist edge (and pairs it nicely with both Paul Verhoeven’s slyly Hitchcockian neonoir Basic Instinct [1992] and David Fincher’s distinctly Verhoeven-ish Gone Girl [2014]). Famously, Dahl’s film was produced as direct-to-video fare (“standard skin-e-max stuff,” in the words of screenwriter Steve Barancik) and aired on HBO before its theatrical release, which invalidated Fiorentino’s Oscar candidacy while also strengthening the pungently illicit whiff of the material itself. The Last Seduction’s deceptively low-rent aesthetics reinstate the kind of scraping, spare-a-dime desperation endemic to the best noir; by keeping things so close to the ground, Dahl scaled the genre’s heights.