Kurtz (Heart of Darkness) circumstances and remote settings to assert power over others. It is widely believed that Conrad drew influence from these characters, as well as Stevenson's plot lines, when writing "Heart of Darkness". In the 1958 loose adaptation for the CBS television anthology series "Playhouse 90" Kurtz was played by Boris Karloff. This version uses the encounter between Marlow and Kurtz as its final act, and adds a backstory in which Marlow had been Kurtz's adopted son. Francis Ford Coppola's acclaimed Vietnam War film "Apocalypse Now" (1979) centers on the protagonist's mission to find and kill the renegade Colonel Kurtz (played by
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