Stalker (1979 film) of the "Time Out Film Guide" has compared "Stalker" to Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now", also released in 1979, and argued that "as a journey to the heart of darkness" "Stalker" looks "a good deal more persuasive than Coppola's." As well, "Slant Magazine" reviewer Nick Schager has praised the film as an "endlessly pliable allegory about human consciousness". In Schager's view "Stalker" shows "something akin to the essence of what man is made of: a tangled knot of memories, fears, fantasies, nightmares, paradoxical impulses, and a yearning for something that's simultaneously beyond our reach and yet intrinsic to every one
Heart of Darkness is immense, and the protagonists are well-acquainted with his accomplishments by the time they finally meet him. Poet Yedda Morrison's 2012 book "Darkness" erases Conrad's novella, "whiting out" his text so that only images of the natural world remain. James Reich's "Mistah Kurtz! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness" presents the early life of Kurtz, his appointment to his station in the Congo, and his messianic disintegration in a novel that dovetails with the conclusion of Conrad's novella. Reich's novel is premised upon the papers Kurtz leaves to Marlow at the end of "Heart of Darkness." In Josef Škvorecký's novel