I watched Ken Russell’s 1980 film Altered States tonight, and I was astounded by all that occurred in it.

But I was surprised about the lead character’s (played by William Hurt) temporary transformation into an earlier ancestor of homo sapiens that then goes romping through the city for a night. I was surprised because this clearly reminded me of Whitley Strieber‘s 1990 novel The Wild, which follows alot of the same path of plotline as Altered States up to very close to the last scenes of the film. The "hallucinatory" degeneration of the lead character’s sense of reality, the physically-manifested changes of his own body, the near-breakdown of his (ex-)wife’s sanity at the sight of his situation, the involvement and intervention of his closest colleagues, all of these elements are present in both Russell’s film and Strieber’s book, both with equally-vivid description and elaboration.

Either way, I love both works.