In a decade where Hollywood grew larger and mainstream cinema became louder, less nuanced, and certainly more brash, blockbuster films took their place at the forefront of the film world. But underneath that top layer of bombastic spectacle, there was a whole range of films that perhaps would have gotten a whole lot more attention if they’d been released in a pre-blockbuster era.

Some were slow-burning character pieces, some were interesting yet violent genre pieces, and some would arguably have remained on the sidelines either way. All of them prove, however, that the eighties were a decade of far more than just Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger hitting people whilst holding enormous guns. That’s perhaps a sweeping generalisation, but you get my point.

In this list, we take a look at ten thrillers that certainly weren’t in the firing line in terms of major releases and today still aren’t the easiest to track down or turn up on TV every couple of weeks.

1. The Stunt Man (1980)

Steve Railsback plays a man on the run who stumbles onto a film set where a stuntman has just been killed. The film’s possibly unhinged director (a terrific Peter O’Toole) spots an opportunity and offers him the dead man’s job and a hiding place from the authorities, provided he keeps his mouth shut and performs increasingly dangerous stunts on demand.

Peter O’Toole gives arguably one of the great late-career performances and bags an Oscar nomination for it; his director is a brilliant yet terrifying and possibly insane individual, and the film hangs on the question of whether he’s a genius or a madman. It’s quite an apt character for a film that feels off the hook from the start, but in the best way possible. Railsback is also in fine form, and the pair of them are joined by Barbara Hershey’s leading lady, who gets caught in the middle of them.

Director Richard Rush spent nine years trying to get the film made, but it was worth it; this is a thriller about filmmaking and romance, yet it fits a whole lot of effective black humor into its run time. Despite its three Oscar nominations, it disappeared from people’s views soon after and more than warrants a reappraisal.

2. The Fourth Man (1983)

Paul Verhoeven might well be better known globally for his English-speaking films, most notably his forays into erotic thrillers (Basic Instinct, Showgirls) or satirical sci-fi thrillers (Total Recall, Starship Troopers), but his early work is every bit as important.

The Fourth Man is one of his finest first features, with Jeroen Krabbe starring as bisexual Dutch writer Gerard on his way to a lecture when he meets Christine (Renée Soutendijk), a beautiful blonde widow who runs a beauty salon. He accepts her invitation to stay the night, and then several more- drawn in by the sex and a photograph of her handsome young boyfriend, who quickly becomes obsessed with. As he starts digging into her past, Gerard begins to suspect that she’s already buried three husbands, and he might well be on the way to being the fourth.

It all sounds very Verhoeven, and everything that he does well is on display here. Sex, Catholic guilt, psychological warfare—it’s all present and correct as Verhoeven began to successfully steamroll his way towards Hollywood. The Fourth Man is a superb example of the early Verhoeven blueprint, and although it might be tricky to track down, it’s well worth doing so.

3. Yokohama BJ Blues (1981)

Starring Yusaku Matsuda as a jazz singer who moonlights as a private detective, Eiichi Kudo’s neo-noir thriller is a moody and atmospheric piece that riffs on The Long Goodbye (1973) and is every bit as engrossing. When one of his friends is killed, Matsuda’s BJ gets the blame and must start his own investigation to clear his name, uncovering a tangled web of corruption and gangsters as well as delving into some underground scenes in search of answers.

Kudo hammers down the aesthetics of the P.I. subgenre, taking you through a murky world of dingy bars, apartments, and back alleys, supplying you with everything you might possibly want from this type of thriller.

Yokohama BJ Blues is one of those features that gets under your skin; you can almost smell the atmosphere that it manages to create, pulling you down into its dank underbelly and spitting you out only at the film’s conclusion.

It’s a film that’s long been championed in Japan, but it’s taken a long time to get the recognition it deserves elsewhere, and one hopes that a recent Blu-ray release will introduce it to a whole new audience.

4. Cutter’s Way (1981)

This is one of those films that you feel like you should have seen—everything about it suggests that it was a far bigger hit than it actually was. Jeff Bridges plays Richard Bone, a drifter working as a small-time boat salesman in Santa Barbara and coasting through life without wanting or needing to commit to anything serious. One night, he sees a man dumping something into an alley, which turns out to be the body of a teenage girl. His best friend Alex Cutter (John Heard), a one-eyed, one-legged (and permanently drunk) Vietnam veteran, becomes convinced he knows who did it and sets about dragging Bone into an obsessive private investigation to bring him down.

Ivan Passer’s film is one of the great post-Vietnam films and sits alongside Dead Presidents (1995) and Rambo: First Blood (1982) in terms of underappreciated examples of films capturing the devastating effects the war had on veterans attempting to return to everyday life.

Bridges is excellent, but it’s Heard who somehow manages to be the heart and soul of the film, managing to be furious, funny, self-destructive, and heartbreaking all at once. Lis Eichhorn is tremendous alongside them as Cutter’s long-suffering wife, held together by alcohol and blind loyalty even when she can see the issues in front of her. Buried on release by a distributor who seemingly didn’t know what to do with it, Cutter’s Way is a masterpiece that’s only just being understood as such.

5. The Border (1982)

Jack Nicholson and Harvey Keitel are electric in Tony Richardson’s El Paso-set low-key thriller. Nicholson is Charlie Smith, a US border patrol agent transferred from Los Angeles because his materialistic wife, Marcy (a superb Valerie Perrine), wants a bigger house and a better life. But what Charlie finds when he arrives is a corrupt operation where his colleagues—led by Keitel’s Cat—are running a lucrative sideline trafficking the very migrants they’re supposed to be turning back. When a young Mexican woman has her baby stolen by the traffickers, Charlie starts to question everything he’s becoming, and Nicholson depicts it brilliantly.

It’s one of his most understated performances, and coming off the back of The Shining (1980), it perhaps didn’t get the attention it warranted. Tony Richardson was possibly better known for his sixties British kitchen sink dramas, yet The Border proves there were many more strings to his bow; he shoots El Paso as a dusty border town in which morals have long since left, and everyone is simply trying to pass the time before they die.

The performances across the board are excellent, and the relationship between Nicholson and Perrine is especially noteworthy; Perrine depicts a woman slowly realising that there’s no reason behind her material efforts to give life meaning, while Nicholson struggles to find her any respite whatsoever. It’s brilliant.