Hot Locations examines how vast, arid environments have become a coveted natural resource for American and European film and media producers. Seeking to sustain the colonial imaginary of the uninhabited frontier, the screen industries have increasingly depended on states in former colonies, transforming portions of their territories into quasi‑extraterritorial zones stripped from Indigenous stewardship, deregulated as tax‑exempt enclaves, and devoted to technomilitary experimentation. This book traces the production of abstracted desert images and re‑anchors them in their material relations to land and to the humans and nonhumans who reside on that land. In so doing, this highly original work theorizes the desert as a distinctive extractive formation within cinema: an environment framed, captured, rendered, and circulated as both war zone and extraterrestrial world.