This article outlines the history of cryonics, starting with fictional novels and movies and the actual formation of the cryonic movement in the 1960s. Cryonics has been considered – by its advocates – to overcome religion by offering a technological way of immortality. Since cryonics never gained serious attention outside the United States it is promising to ask for the specific frame of American funeral culture as a condition for the emergence (and the limitations) of cryonics