Science fiction often uses allegories to present new ideas in interesting ways, but as a genre it also often borrows creatively from other sources. Here are ten movies that are either remakes of other genres or use a critical idea that they borrowed from a book or a movie that wasn’t science fiction.

Outland (1981)

Directed and written by Peter Hyams, this Sean Connery vehicle takes most of its plot points and narrative from the Fred Zinnemann classic western, High Noon(1952). That’s marginally less surprising when you discover that the movie was originally written by Hyams as a western, but the success of Blade Runnerand Alien convinced him to make it a space based film.

The technical term for a space western is a ‘Bat Durston’, after an infamous advert printed in GalaxyMagazine in 1950, which concocted a space gunslinger only to tear the subgenre to pieces. The reputation of western-themed sci-fi took a real beating in the ’50s, and it did take a long time to be considered as anything more than pulp material.

That said, Gene Roddenberry sold the pilot for Star Trek as ‘wagon train to the stars’ in the 60s, so some people liked the genre mix. A more recent example of this is Firefly and its associated movie Serenity, which draws on the post American civil war era as its historical reference.