Do Not Be Afraid of the Men in the Woods
Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake unmoors from time, marking the days instead by shots of Franck’s car pulling into a dirt lot by the woods. Every day, he walks down the same paths, reaching the beach where gay men lay naked and prone on the shore like sunning seals, penises flopped out, bellies bulging over the water as they glance at the latest arrival.
The night before I failed my license test the first time, my mom and I watched Psycho. Shots of Janet Leigh behind the wheel, leaving town, were prescient. The next morning, I would fail the test immediately, running over a curb as I pulled out of the driving school’s parking lot.
Psycho is often heralded as one of the first horror movies. In a horror film class in college, we began our semester with a study of Hitchcock’s 1960 film. The course textbook’s cover featured the rotting head of Mrs. Bates.
The slow burn, the dread of Hitchcock’s filmmaking was ascribed to Stranger by the Lake, Alain Guiraudie’s sumptuous 2013 film in which Franck lusts for Michel at a cruising spot on a lake in France. One evening, after an awkward hook-up with a man in the woods, Franck lingers, watching the lake from above. There, he witnesses Michel drowning Ramière, a man who’s clung to him. Suddenly, Michel is available, and he and Franck begin hooking up.
The film unmoors from time, marking the days instead by shots of Franck’s car pulling into a dirt lot by the woods. Every day, he walks down the same paths, reaching the beach where gay men lay naked and prone on the shore like sunning seals, penises flopped out, bellies bulging over the water as they glance at the latest arrival. What emerges is a catalogue of men who cruise—a serial masturbator, a serial monogamist, and Henri, an older man who Franck befriends. Henri has slept with men but doesn’t come to cruise. Instead he seeks a place to sit quietly and enjoy vacation after divorcing his wife.
The drowning takes place early on, and a detective begins snooping around, adding himself to the collection of men veiled by tree branches and shadows. There’s this sense that you never know who will emerge from a hiding spot, or what he’s looking for. Every day, Franck must focus this kaleidoscope of men who want something different.
The film never journeys beyond the lake, the woods, the parking lot. Held in the same locations in shots last for so long conjures the slow dread of Hitchcock’s films. We’re modern viewers primed for jump scares and surprises—think of any movie produced by James Wan—yet Stranger by the Lake works in slow, psychological unease. Though every day we fear Michel–Franck’s cold, sexy, murderous love interest–every day Franck returns. And each day Franck pulls into the lot once more, we have to ask, will this be the day that things go wrong?
In her book In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado writes about queer villains. A glance at Disney’s cast of villainous drag queens and “effete ne’er-do-wells” reveals, on its face, a highly problematic understanding of queerness. Machado, though, holds such deep affection for them. By having their wrongdoings represented, so too can their humanity be acknowledged, although less so in the case of these caricatures. What’s most exciting to her is when queer villains actually become more complex.
“As it turns out, queer villains become far more interesting among other gay characters, both within a specific project or universe and the zeitgeist at large,” Machado writes. “They become one star in a larger constellation; they are put in context.”
She writes this essay in response to Stranger by the Lake, and the strange charisma and vacancy of Michel. The film gives humanity to the various men Franck encounters. A man who’s worried about HIV and not using a condom returns amidst the investigation, paranoid about what the detective might find. A man who follows Franck into the woods and likes masturbating while watching Franck with other men spends one evening with him, talking a bit before strolling away. While the lake has become a spot for danger and worry, the worry lies with one individual as opposed to cruising categorically. Amidst the investigation, Franck also learns about the other frequent visitors.
In one, haunted scene in the parking lot at night, the detective finds Franck. Suspecting Michel of the murder, he asks Franck about the cruising scene, how isn’t it odd that everyone has resumed life as normal. He says, “But you guys have a strange way of loving each other sometimes.” The film’s exploration of male homosexuality is complex enough that this isn’t flatly homophobic. Instead, it’s triangulated by the inspector’s concern that there might be a homophobic killer on the loose, and Franck’s desire to be part of a couple that shares dinner and spends the night together instead of meeting daily for sex in the woods.
Franck responds to the detective, “We can’t stop living,” and Machado celebrates this moment, too, in her essay: “We can’t stop living. Which means we have to live, which means we are alive, which means we are humans and we are human.”
Psycho famously ends with Norman Bates, dressed as his mother and bearing a knife. Hitchcock’s movie released sixty years ago, and its transphobic construction of horror too has come under fire.
My horror textbook was titled The Dread of Difference, and many of its essays explored how horror engages with the anxiety surrounding somebody who is an other. Horror film has a legacy of unpacking and reexamining social issues, something that many speculative modes do well.
In Stranger by the Lake, the killer is one of us, and he’s an “other” because he’s the killer, he’s the one who reacts so violently, an aberration. In Stranger by the Lake, there’s pleasure, too, in the woods, in the water. There’s time spent asking how everyone connects differently with cruising culture.
Sometimes I remember the tension of a horror movie when I feel anxious in the world. Maybe it comes when I run over a curb. Maybe it comes when I hold hands with my boyfriend in the south and someone watches too long. I’m thinking about Machado’s constellation. I’m thinking about all those men in the woods.
