I may be nuts, but shouldn't this have started like 10 minutes ago? I'm on central time, which is 2 hours behind pacific...

EDIT - I will leave this here to demonstrate how utterly stupid I am, but yeah...  I got here about 4 hours early cause my brain is dumb. I forgot the sun goes around the earth from east to west. The sun does go around the earth, doesn't it?

I have to assume that Del Toro isn't dumb enough to leave something like the Pale Man scene in the film unless he wanted it there for a specific reason. I'll be damned if I know what the reason is, but I'm more likely to believe that he had some legit reason for doing that - at least in his own head - whereas there are many other writers/directors to whom I would never give that much credit.

But even if Del Toro did have some specific reason to write some of these more 'troubling' scenes the way he did, it doesn't mean that it makes any sense or that he shouldn't have done it some other way. If the goal was just to have an excuse to have the Pale Man wake up, a 'suspense' moment of him closing in on her while she was unaware, a moment where the Pale Man demonstrates exactly what he'll do if he catches her (eat her alive), and then have her flee to the next suspense scene where she's trying to make a door as he's closing in on her again... This is probably the most straightforward way to write that. Maybe that's all it is. Just writing it as plainly as he could.

As far as the replies to my original post RE: "it's an interesting detail, but how is that helping the story?"

I have no idea. I just find it fascinating. I didn't notice it until after I had seen the flick a couple times. There are some other things that I'd love to figure out as well. I haven't given much thought to the story about the rose that gives eternal life, but I'm gonna bet that it does have some correlation to the film. Perhaps the fact that the film has so many things like that that is evidence of some poor writing. If that stuff is SUPPOSED to make sense and enlighten the rest of the film in some way, then obviously I'm in the dark, and I assume a lot of other people are as well.

It could be a cultural thing, tho. It's possible that in Spain or Mexico these stories are obvious references to something specific to that culture.

@Jeffery
I agree with you, man. I didn't really go into it expecting much beyond "War" and "some fantasy stuff". Pretty sure someone had told me before I went into it that it was more 'reality' than 'fantasy', so maybe I was just better prepared for what the film was, as opposed to the people who just saw the trailers and thought "ooh, dark Alice In Wonderland!". The trailers were pretty misleading...