Dead Souls

An Ace Double paperback featuring the screenplay to Alex Cox's 'last' film - Dead Souls - plus the original Nikolai Gogol text. Dead Souls, directed by and starring Alex Cox, is a surreal, lean, meditative, low-budget Spaghetti Western adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's classic novel, transposed to the 19th-century American West, that feels both literary and rebellious. The film follows Strindler (Alex Cox), a conniving preacher buying up names of deceased Mexicans, blending political satire on greed and corruption with meta-humour, stop-motion, and musical numbers. The story mirrors Gogol's original novel, set in a dusty, morally bankrupt frontier town where Strindler travels, collecting the names of 'dead souls' to gain power and money.

Maverick British filmmaker Alex Cox is responsible for directing a host of acclaimed films from Sleep is for Sissies, Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, Straight to Hell, Walker and Highway Patrolman to Death and the Compass, Three Businessmen, Revenger's Tragedy, Searchers 2.0 and more recently Tombstone Rashomon. From 1987 to 1994, he presented the acclaimed BBC TV series 'Moviedrome', bringing unknown or forgotten films to new audiences. He's also the author of X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker, 10,000 Ways to Die, The President and the Provocateur and Alex Cox's Introduction to Film and has written on the subject of film for publications including Sight and Sound, The Guardian, The Independent and Film Comment. ;His latest film, ;Dead Souls, based on Gogol's book of the same name, was ;released in 2025. The screenplay will be available later in 2026 from Kamera Books. ; Gianni Garko (born Giovanni Garcovich) is a Croatian-Italian actor. He found fame as a leading man in 1960s Spaghetti Westerns, where he was often billed as John Garko and occasionally Gary Hudson. He is perhaps best known for his lead role as Sartana, starting with the first official film ;If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death ;and starring in three sequels as this character.