On the district council web site of Thanet, a peninsula in Southeast England, one can learn that painter William Turner, when sketching in the environs in the 1820s and 30s found the skies over the area to be “the loveliest in all Europe.” A bit further down, the same website tells us that today, the coastal skies are being mediated in new ways: “From Film Noir, Dogma and horror to TV – the bright lights are shining for Thanet.” The Isle of Thanet is one example of how regions today expectantly redefine themselves in relation to a new cultural landscape. Cities and municipalities worldwide today compete in presenting themselves as “film friendly” environments offering an abundance of fertile and favourable grounds for media production. Through the establishing of funding platforms and location databases or through the setting up of special ‘codes of practice’, ample room is provided for new spatial actors with new claims to unveil, characterize, program and direct sites and spaces. In the present essay, English Thanet; a tourist destination past its time now aiming for a comeback; will be compared with the recently so successful crime film location of Ystad, Sweden, similarly a coastal municipality defending its position within the framework of a new ‘experience economy’. The comparison will fall in to a discussion, on the one hand about how the new media practices and professions affect the popular imaginary of sites and spaces, and on the other hand how they impinge on spatial discourse and policies of spatial reproduction. What are the determining criteria for new spatial actors? What kinds of sites are being targeted and how are they being administered and maintained? Surfacing in the media surge is the old spatial dichotomy between permanence and production, but also a new and contested kind of site – the ‘location’ – a temporary merger of authenticity claims, productivity demands and material conditions.