How does Poe use setting, imagery, and mood to play on the reader's primal fears?

The setting for the majority of the story is the Montresor family catacombs.  Montresor himself describes them as "insufferably damp [and] encrusted with nitre": hardly pleasant.  Furthermore, it is the repository for the bodies of the once-large Montresor family, meaning that there will be numerous dead persons in various stages of advanced decomposition: even less pleasant!  We, humans, tend to relegate cemeteries and the like to separate spaces away from where we perform our daily routines, because we tend not to like reminders of death.  By setting the story in a place of death, Poe plays on our primal fear of it in order to influence the mood of the story.  The sepulchral setting contributes to the mood of menace and foreboding.
Further, the imagery of the men's descent into the catacombs further plays on our fears and adds to this mood.  The men must light their way with "two flambeaux," or torches, going through "several suites of rooms to the archway" entrance to the vaults; then they must descend "a long and winding staircase."  Once they reach the catacombs, Montresor points out "'the white web-work which gleams from [the] cavern walls."  This web work sounds a lot like a spider's web, as though Montresor is like a spider who has lured his prey, Fortunato, to his death.  Such descriptions sound almost as though the men have descended to the land of the dead, the underworld, going lower as it gets darker and darker: we fear darkness and death and this setting and the imagery checks all the boxes.