“Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?” -- Kenneth Patchen.
Many horror movies take place in what I call "Horror Movie Land", which is some non-specific time in the past, usually in middle or eastern Europe but sometimes in France or the UK or even early America. The time period can vary from the late middle ages all the way up to the early 20th Century (the automobile in Hammer's Kiss of the Vampire is a giveaway, for one example). What they have in common is that these settings are nowhere real. They are, rather, archetypal landscapes, the land of dreams and nightmares conjured up by the Gothic imagination of the Romantics. Think of the bleak landscapes painted by artists like Caspar David Friedrich or Otto Runge, or the Europe of Melmoth the Wanderer or The Castle of Otranto. Almost all horror movies that are set in Horror Movie Land abstract their settings for effect. There's a level of theatricality in all such movies, whether they're shot on a soundstage, as Corman's Poe movies were, or in the landscapes favored by Hammer and Amicus. Osgood Perkins's new film, Gretel & Hansel is set in a more abstract version of Horror Movie Land than usual. The locale is doggedly non-specific (the Hansel and Gretel story is German, but this film doesn't seem particularly Germanic), and the time period seems to exist outside of a historical context. Given the film's origins in a fairy tale, it's entirely appropriate that it exists inside an archetype rather than in a specific time and space. It makes for a strange mood.
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