Smenkharon:

I simply meant influences: the idea that perceptual reality is illusory, overlaid on another more "real" one, or that "reality" is simply a construct (althought strictly speaking, that didn't become a SF trope until William Gibson with Neuromancer and Count Zero. In Dick's Time Out of Joint, the protagonist was was unwittingly figuring out in-coming missile trajectories from the Soviet bloc when he did his daily crossword puzzles.

The Europeans (the French particularly) loved the idea that Dick populated his stuff with regular guys, not "heros". So a taxi driver gets to save the universe, altho I guess Bruce Willis may not be your just regular guy. Luc Besson started his career in the comics, so there's some degrees of seperation.

mark f:

They Live was taken from PK Dick and Ray Nelson's The Ganymede Takeover, and is a variation on the "we are property" trope that popped up in 40s, 50s SF and Horror - in no large part thanks to the thinking (or nonsense) of Charle Forte and the writings of Lovecraft. Carpenter made it fairly straight SF with a few aliens and a bit of Reagan critique thrown in. Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness are more orthodox in the Lovecraft axis, where the horror element is more explicit. I like Prince simply because it fuses horror elements with SF elements in a rather unlikely but seamless way (liquid satan and time travel/dimensional displacement-[maybe that's genius, mark f]), altho I could've done without the zombies that seemed to have walked straight out of Night of the Living Dead. But hey, we all gotta be Hollywood bankable.

By the way I have no taste for either Forte or Lovecraft; I don't get it.
Bad science, crackpot ideas, tabloid yearnings, but then, what is Close Encounter and Taken? Superscience aliens comes across endless light years to put on a light show and rescue Richard Dryfuss from a boring marriage. People from all walk of life disappear, not for good real reasons or bad fate, but from bad reasons like superscience aliens wanting to train for medical licence or have sex with Earth women (men too, I guess). Or elsewhere, nitwit superscience alien enslaving whole human population in gorgeous looking locales to built monumental architecture that can be seen from space.

But, to prove the point that there is no such thing as a bad idea that you can't make a buck off of, or create great literature, consider Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan (LinnTate, please come educate the guys).

In Sirens of Titan, stranded superscience alien created human civiliztion (and I mean created, from an evolutionary standpoint) so that monumental architecture can be seen from space, and to manufacture a spare part to repair a crippled transporter hidden in one of the Jovian moon to return to the greater galaxy in Andromeda.

Gives a whole new meaning to ET call home!