Suddenly a cloaked figure appears in the foreground, his large-brimmed black hat unmoving as he floats toward the barn, one haunted step after another. An eerie song alights his sudden appearance, bringing with it a heightened feeling of dread.

We follow from closely behind, matching him step for step. He enters the barn, and the last we see of the mysterious stranger, he is climbing up a rickety ladder to whatever awaits him in the loft.

This was "Creature Features," a TV program my inner 10-year-old misses dearly.

Nearly every Saturday night I’d stay up past my 8:30 p.m. bedtime and watch this show in glorious black and white, each presenting a B-horror or science fiction movie from the 50s. Every show began with that same stranger, climbing those same creepy stairs.

For a boy having been born long before "Aliens," "Predator," and a hog trough of similar high-tech monster movies, it didn’t take much more than a rubber suit to delightfully creep me out.

One of my favorites was, "Monster on Campus," in which "Fear stalks the seemingly tranquil halls of Dunsfield University with the arrival of a prehistoric fish, the coelacanth."

I can still see paleontology professor Donald Blake setting the large fish on the examination table, his fingers wrapped carelessly inside the creature’s sharp-toothed mouth. He sets the fish down and "CRRUNCH," the jaws close on his hand, causing no serious harm, except that now Professor Blake is CURSED TO BECOME A PREHISTORIC BEAST WITH EVERY FULL MOON!

Watching it today, you can see the glue on the monster’s face. You can see the string holding a rubber mosquito the size of a bald eagle as it hovers outside a classroom window (it recently having supped on the coelacanth) sending those inside cowering.

But as a child -- before the mind has been filled with horrors to make a rubber Neanderthal mask look, well, like a rubber Neanderthal mask -- it was gloriously frightening.

"The Tingler" was another favorite of mine. In it, Vincent Price starts as an "obsessed doctor who discovers that fear manifests itself as a parasitic creature that grows on the spinal chords of terrified people."

When a "Tingler" escapes into a crowded movie theater, all lights go off and the only sound you hear is of Vincent Price shouting to theater-goers (both those within the movie, and those watching in real life), "The Tingler is in the theater! The only way to kill it is to scream! SCREAM FOR YOUR LIVES!"

In some theaters, "Tingler" director William Castle hooked small electrodes to some seats, causing a "tingling" sensation and probably a great deal of hysteria.

Sure, it’s a little cheesy. You can almost see the string pull the Tingler along as it scurries across a floor, but regardless, I’ll take "The Tingler" over just about any modern monster movie.

Then there’s the Michael Landon cult classic, "I Was a Teenage Werewolf," in which a young Landon takes typical teen angst to the extreme. Instead of slamming his bedroom door or turning up his music, he grows long hair and fangs and goes around growling and eating everything in his path. Of course, today we know it doesn’t take a full moon to do that. Just ask a teen to do a few chores.

There are other movies for which I can only recall a few scenes, such as when a bunch of tree-creatures waddle through town creating terror as only tree creatures can. Silly, yet seriously creepy. I can remember an expedition to outer space returning with a female space vampire with a pointy head (or pointy hair, I can’t remember).

The great joy in these movies is their delightful innocence. As bad as the monster was, you never saw blood or gore, and most hadn’t even an indirect reference to Satan (Dracula being the exception, but even Bela Lagosi’s monster had a 1930s innocence that later versions would snuff out).

I love these old movies with their charming, rubber-outfitted monsters that scared the bejeses out of me.

I feel sorry for today’s kids. The charm that the classics held has been shoved out of existence.

But then, when you consider the images they see nearly every day coming out of Iraq and other parts of the world, who’s afraid of Frankenstein, much less a guy in a rubber tree suit?