Poe was the first author to come up with what society would now refer to as a "pshycological thriller". So the next time you sit down to watch "The Sixth Sense" just remember it was Poe who got Willis and little Haley Joel those parts in the first place. It was Poe's ability to dig into the raw of emotion and depression and discover the common, human similarities of people that made his dark characterizations so believable. Poe was a big fan of using the innerworkings of a single person's mind to further his plot and help give eyes to the scenes depicted in the story or poem.
The most unique thing about this approach is that the reader feels the pain and dispair of one guilty mourning lover such as in The Raven, his most well known and most often cited piece, or the reasonably deducting and cooly logical mind trying to reveal the identity of a murderer in Rue Morgue by piecing together the odd clues and witness accounts
