At first sight, Midsommar, a horror film set in Scandinavia, seems to have little to do with Central Europe. The title refers to Sweden's traditional mid-summer festival of music, food, and dance. The pagan, cult-like Hårga community lives apart from other humans and only opens up to visitors every 90 years. This time has arrived. Dani, a woman whose sister killed her parents and herself, seeks some relief by accompanying her boyfriend Christian and his fellow graduate students of anthropology, to travel to Sweden and take part in the event. One-by-one, the students are picked off by the Hårga, unaware of what is happening, until only Dani is left. She ends up approving the murder of her boyfriend by the cult, a way for herself to become a member.

The film is made by the American director Ari Aster and was distributed by Amazon Prime. The main actors are an Englishwoman, an American, and a Swede. Other than that, almost all the actors are Hungarians pretending to be Swedes. The location, named as Hålsingland – a real place in Sweden – is actually Hungary.

Why Hungary rather than Sweden? Certainly, economics must have played a role in the producers’ choice: lax labour laws, favourable tax treatment. But the work of Anikó Imre, a scholar who has been in the forefront of research on how race and whiteness function in the media produced in Central Europe, suggests that there is much more at play. Focusing on the Netflix series, The Witcher, based on Polish source material and shot mostly in Hungary, Imre notes how Central and Eastern Europe provide a location where the vagaries of racial guilt can be dreamed away, where one can escape race as one of the major problems of contemporary life. Imre refers to Central European nations’ claimed lack of responsibility for racialized, colonial exploitation (see Chapters 7–9 in this book), as a fantasy of ‘white innocence’. The fantasy is eagerly supported by media producers in the West, and especially in America. It induces them to consider Central Europe as the ideal location for plots that are free of the complications of race and the guilt that historical racial exploitation brings with it. Their ‘white innocence’ is an imagined condition of pure, undisturbed, and guiltfree whiteness.