Funeral director

A funeral director is an individual who manages funerary preparations for the recently deceased. These duties include preparing the bodies for burial, arranging for cremation, managing funeral receptions and viewing, coordinating with gravestone, blanket and funeral urn providers and providing comfort to grieving loved ones during services.

In Paris, France in the mid-1800s, an inattentive, elderly morgue keeper kept a record of various bodies being brought in, most of which were those of young women whose bodies had been fished out of the Seine. He made private dealings with a medical student named August Dupin to deliver fresh corpses to him for study.

In the British horror anthology series Hammer House of Horror, there were two funeral directors named Basil and Cedric Ashford who ran the Ashford Bros. Funeral Home in England. Though stoic in appearance, the Ashford's did not have the most scrupulous motivations behind their practice. They made secret transactions with Humphrey Chesterton of the Chesterton clinic to reroute dead bodies to his household where they would be consumed by his cannibal guests.

On the U.S. version of the supernatural monster-mash series Being Human, there was a character named Max, who was the funeral director of the Howell & Holt Funeral Home in Boston, Massachusetts. Despite his youth, Max took his chosen vocation very seriously, administering the greatest of care to the deceased and offering counseling to grief-stricken loved ones.