Necrophobia is a specific phobia which is the irrational fear of dead things (e.g., corpses) as well as things associated with death (e.g., coffins, tombstones, funerals, cemeteries). With all types of emotions, obsession with death becomes evident in both fascination and objectification. In a cultural sense, necrophobia may also be used to mean a fear of the dead by a cultural group, e.g., a belief that the spirits of the dead will return to haunt the living.

Symptoms include: shortness of breath, rapid breathing, irregular heartbeat, sweating, dry mouth and shaking, feeling sick and uneasy, psychological instability, and an altogether feeling of dread and trepidation. The sufferer may feel this phobia all the time. The sufferer may also experience this sensation when something triggers the fear, like a close encounter with a dead animal or the funeral of a loved one or friend. The fear may have developed when a person witnessed a death, or was forced to attend a funeral as a child. Some people experience this after viewing frightening media.

The fear can manifest itself as a serious condition. Treatment options include medication and therapy.

The word "necrophobia" is derived from the Greek "nekros" () for "corpse" and the Greek "phobos" () for "fear".

Death anxiety is anxiety which is caused by thoughts of death. One source defines death anxiety as a "feeling of dread, apprehension or solicitude (anxiety) when one thinks of the process of dying, or ceasing to 'be'". It is also referred to as thanatophobia (fear of death), and is distinguished from necrophobia, which is a specific fear of dead or dying persons and/or things (i.e. others who are dead or dying, not one's own death or dying).

Additionally, there is anxiety caused by death-related thought-content, which might be classified within a clinical setting by a psychiatrist as morbid and/or abnormal, which for classification pre-necessitates a degree of anxiety which is persistent and interferes with everyday functioning. Lower ego integrity, more physical problems, and more psychological problems are predictive of higher levels of death anxiety in elderly people because of how close to death they are.

Predatory death anxiety arises from the fear of being harmed. It is the most basic and oldest form of death anxiety, with its origins in the first unicellular organisms’ set of adaptive resources. Unicellular organisms have receptors that have evolved to react to external dangers, along with self-protective, responsive mechanisms made to guarantee survival in the face of chemical and physical forms of attack or danger. In humans, predatory death anxiety is evoked by a variety of danger situations that put one at risk or threaten one's survival. These traumas may be physical, psychological, or both. Predatory death anxiety mobilizes an individual’s adaptive resources and leads to a fight-or-flight response: active efforts to combat the danger or attempts to escape the threatening situation.