Buried alive people embody several universal fears. Invisible, buried in a coffin, they are both fascinating and staggering. Transfigured by literature and cinema, they make themselves seen and heard in particular in a strikingly humoristic manner. They sometimes raise from their grave thus upsetting a whole practical world (medicine, hygiene, thanatology) as well as a symbolic one (mourning, religious rites, metaphysical ideas). But the paradigm of premature burial is renewed by the new types of representation that science fiction offers.