Much has already been written on Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder - separately; yet, many of their films do share common features. Although The Trouble with Harry can be seen as a fanciful utopia while Avanti! is more realistic and serious, the approach to death offered by these movies is, in fact, similar: not only corpses and burials are turned into comic motives but the dead are more than lifeless bodies and they “help” the characters who survive them to learn the art of living and of loving, and also to see death in a less tragic light. Hitchcock and Wilder take risks by reversing the values of their audiences and by breaking some taboos; still, they manage to produce movies that are all but ghoulish. This article aims at analyzing the filming and narrative techniques allowing the two directors to do so.