Love & Passion Quote by Sergio Aragones

Aragones is doing something deceptively brutal here: he’s calling out a whole genre of “horror” as basically a jump-scare in narrative clothing. The example he picks, the killer in the back seat, is a greatest hit because it’s purely mechanical. It doesn’t reveal character, it doesn’t complicate the world, it just toggles fear on and off like a light switch. His “infantile” isn’t moral scolding; it’s an aesthetic complaint. If the engine of your story is a reflex, you haven’t built a story, you’ve built a trap.

The under-the-bed comparison is the key piece of subtext. Childhood fear isn’t wrong because it’s irrational; it’s wrong as a storytelling strategy when it’s the only thing you’ve got. Aragones is defending craft over stimulus. The monster under the bed is a fear that dissolves the moment you turn on the light; real horror, like real comedy, survives illumination. It has to. It lingers because it’s about human behavior, social rot, power, shame, complicity - not because something lunges from a shadow at the 17-second mark.

Coming from a cartoonist famed for visual economy and relentless punchlines, this reads as a manifesto. Aragones built careers on timing, but he’s allergic to cheap timing. The line draws a boundary: surprise is easy; meaning is hard. If you want fear that lasts, you can’t outsource it to the back seat. You have to put it in the driver.