Thanks for the voluminous comments to an FF I thought was long dead. I like your ideas, especially the earlier setting.

(1) Remaking the film with Ewoks, and calling it ‘The Ewok Village’ -oops, sorry, was accidentally channelling the George Lucas of the second trilogy.

(2) MNS gets these gee-whiz images in his head, but doesn’t think sufficiently about how to get there. The founders of the village would have thought of some mechanism for getting essential supplies from the outside world, and they would have put it somewhere where continuous, expensive, unlikely-to actually-work-if-you-think-about-it-for-ten-seconds cooperation from the outside world was not necessary.
The first two changes we notice are that it is more of a mediaeval village, not an 1890s one: people have made everything themselves, not bought it to stock a movie set. Also, there are ominous fir trees, rather than leafless ones. We open with the burial of the Healing Elder, who has died suddenly and unexpectedly. The rest of the tale ensues pretty much as before, but nobody mentions the towns: there are no towns. This is all there is, as far as anybody knows.
The Healing Elder was the only one who ever left the village, going for weeks at a time to bring back secret medicines etc.; s/he was the only one who knew how to travel safely in the lands of Those We Do Not Name. The Elders argue about whether Ivy should be allowed to seek out the Healing Elder’s secret place to find Lucius-saving stuff: they have never been there themselves. They keep up the act with the monster suits, but they don’t actually know why: it is just the way they were taught when they were initiated as Elders, years ago.
Ivy learns the monsters are fake and wanders off through the dark pinewoods in the direction the Healing Elder used to go. After all the adventues she had in the last version, she comes to a hunting lodge on a lake, a building not too different from the ones in the village. But inside is a computer with a sattelite internet connection, a fridge full of cold beer and antibiotics, and other neat stuff. Outside a floatplane is moored on the jetty. The Healing Elder used to come here, order stuff on ebay, fly to the nearest town, and pick it up… s/he just never got around to training an apprentice. It was the parents of the present Elders who established the Vilage, back in the 1930s, somewhere in the wilds of northern Saskatchewan…

The silliest thing in the whole movie was the ‘planes being payed to stay away’ line. Once we know it is today, we can cut back to the night sky above the Village, as some Villagers make the ‘sign against evil’ agaisnt the mysterious demon light passing far overhead.