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
Kurtz (Heart of Darkness) worshipped as a god by his underlings; in Caesar's case, his followers believe him to be the reincarnation of Mars, the Roman god of war. The video game "" (2012), another modernized loose adaptation of "Heart of Darkness" (set in a ruined Dubai), has a similar Kurtz figure named Colonel John Konrad. Timothy Findley's novel "Headhunter" (1993) features Kurtz's escape from "Heart of Darkness" and subsequent reign of terror over the city of Toronto as the psychiatrist-in-chief at the Parkin Institute. The poem "The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot starts off with the line "Mistah Kurtz - He Dead." In