This study investigates Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and its film adaptation, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, by examining the character of the Fisher King, a common figure at the beginning of human society who was later incorporated into romance literature, especially in the quest for the Holy Grail in the Arthurian legend. A superior warrior of godlike proportions, he leads his people to health and prosperity; as Fisher King, however, he becomes sick, and that sickness is reflected in the land he rules. If the king and the land are one, the task is to restore the Fisher King to health or to find a similarly superior but younger and stronger warrior to replace him for the well being and continuity of the land. Modeled along the lines of a Nietzschean ubermensch, or superman, Conrad’s Kurtz is a superior, humanistic, and visionary man who becomes a Fisher King in the jungles of colonial Africa. The film transposes Conrad’s plot from the late 19th century to the latter part of the 20th century, moving from Africa to Asia, where Kurtz, a superior American military officer during the war in Vietnam, becomes a Fisher King in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The final words of Kurtz, the Fisher King in both the book and the film, are: “The horror! The horror!” Accounting for the changes of the geographical and historical setting as well as the evolving culture, the study seeks to determine the fate of the Fisher King and the nature of the horror he discovers.