BRET EASTON ELLIS, the author of “Less Than Zero” and a man who knows a thing or two about the 1980s, recently tweeted, “The two key American films of the 1980s: ‘Blue Velvet,’ ‘Something Wild’...” The first choice is no surprise, but the second confused some of his followers. “When I tweeted it, people responded to ‘Blue Velvet’ but asked, ‘What’s the other one?,’ ” Mr. Ellis said in a telephone interview.

“Blue Velvet,” released in September 1986, was hailed as a noir masterpiece and edged David Lynch, the director, further into the mainstream. “Something Wild,” directed by Jonathan Demme, came out two months later and met with a chillier reception. Part romance, part road movie, part blood-spattered psychodrama, the film — starring Melanie Griffith as Lulu, a New York City wild child, and Jeff Daniels as Charles, her yuppie lover — was a tricky sell at the time. “It’s a schizophrenic movie,” Mr. Demme said in an interview. “A screwball comedy that turns into a film noir, as life itself does.”

Other like-minded films from that era, including Susan Seidelman’s “Desperately Seeking Susan,” in which another bourgeoise searcher (Rosanna Arquette) takes a dark foray into bohemia, enjoyed long afterlives on cable. The frequently gruesome “Something Wild,” though, was largely forgotten, even as Mr. Demme went on to make the Oscar winners “Silence of the Lambs” and “Philadelphia.” But some fans, including Mr. Ellis, who would similarly combine hard-core violence and pop-culture clutter in his 1991 book “American Psycho,” never forgot it. “I just showed it to someone who’s 24 and into film and they said, ‘Why did I miss this movie?’ ” Mr. Ellis said, adding that the film had had a huge influence on him.

Now “Something Wild” is being released by the Criterion Collection on Blu-ray and DVD, and viewers in a post-Tarantino world are less likely to bristle at its disregard for genre boundaries. The movie’s bold and funny sexuality, carefully handpicked thrift-store art direction, hip cameos and soundtrack full of cool bands like X and Big Audio Dynamite now seem like a blueprint for the coming auteur-as-curator era of independent film. When John Travolta is gunned down clutching the ’60s spy thriller “Modesty Blaise” in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” (1994), for example, it recalls the first time we encounter Lulu, reading a biography of Frida Kahlo. And you can see some of Mr. Demme’s minute attention to oddball detail in the terrariumlike sets of Wes Anderson films, including “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001).