Which Creep Shows Have a Ghost of a Chance?

I was having this drink in a bar alone, and an alien approached me. --Woman in “Ghostbusters 2” *

Some of us would go just about anywhere for a good scare.

Even to PBS, where Sunday’s season opener for the once-grand, now-gray “Masterpiece Theatre” stars Oscar-winning Emma Thompson in a ghost story called “The Blue Boy.”

Blue boy, shmue boy. Bob’s Big Boy is scarier.

Luckily, there are hair-raising alternatives to this limp PBS offering.

When it comes to TV tales about the supernatural and other seemingly inexplicable phenomena, Fox’s celestial second-year series, “The X-Files,” is by far television’s finest. And though resonating comical tabloid headlines, the syndicated series “Sightings” and “The Extraordinary” are also eerier than “The Blue Boy.”

Still more tingle potential arrives Oct. 9 with the return of “Encounters: The Hidden Truth,” Fox’s replacement for the just-shelved “Fortune Hunter.” Even “The UFO Cover-Up: Live From Area 51”--Larry King’s Saturday-night special on cable’s TNT--promises more suspense than “The Blue Boy.” It couldn’t promise less.

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There was a time when the season’s first “Masterpiece Theatre” was an awaited event, but that golden age is long past, mirroring a decline in British productions of the quality that for years had nourished TV’s most Anglophilic drama series. Those redcoattails are now so short that “Masterpiece Theatre” has little to grab onto.

Thompson’s box-office potential is the only possible rationale for launching things with something as bad as “The Blue Boy.” Inspired by legend, it’s an inferior, one-hour story that finds Thompson playing a Scottish woman whose stay at a rural lakeside hotel with her philandering husband (Adrian Dunbar) turns ghostly--but never ghastly enough to supply even a mild fright.

It turns out that the place is haunted by the spirit of a boy who drowned in the lake, the cold depths turning him blue. Despite laboring to veil his BBC production in dark mystique, director/writer Paul Murton falls short of even murkiness. Even the highly proficient Thompson can’t warm this cadaver. When the blue boy does show up, well, the word silly comes to mind, making this the slightest “Masterpiece Theatre” premiere in years.

Measured against “The Blue Boy,” Fox’s consistently intriguing hour, “The X-Files,” is a true masterpiece. There’s no more challenging series on television and, as a bonus, it’s also brainy fun.

While assigned last season to investigate unsolved cases called X-Files, FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) encountered all sorts of creepy, crawly things. And even though their separate X-Files operation has now been mysteriously scotched by superiors, paranormal specialist Mulder and physician Scully are still on the job this season.

Last Friday’s exquisitely stinky episode had them investigating a sewage-habitating parasite, a half-human/half-monster hybrid that turned out to be a radiation-bred creature of the Chernobyl disaster. That revelation ended the hour on a note of melancholy not atypical of this interestingly moody series. But while “The X-Files” is straight-faced sober except for an occasional sardonic crack by Mulder, there was something delectably tongue-in-cheek about having the yucky predator at one point hide in the slop of a portable toilet. And something terrifying about the eely thing that slithered from the corpse of one of its victims as Scully performed an autopsy.

Tonight, Mulder--assisted mostly from long range by Scully--probes a series of killings by phobic individuals who receive subliminal commands from digitalized messages transmitted via screens of all kinds. Although a thickening residue of clues allows Mulder to figure out what is happening, not all is revealed, and the episode purposely dangles a big loose end for viewers to ponder. It also expands its running mystery about unseen government forces shaping the fates of Mulder and the X-Files venture.

The underplaying Duchovny and Anderson are swell in their roles as attractive opposites who somehow are not romantically attracted to each other. Credit executive producer Chris Carter with knowing that romance could dilute the cerebral inkiness of his series, which to date has been remarkably schmaltz-free.

Not so “Sightings,” which suckles on schmaltz while featuring a bunch of Coneheads who have either been in the sun way too long or know a lot more than the rest of us.

To believe the messages delivered by “Sightings,” you have to first believe the messenger. In this regard, “Sightings” is more show biz than fact biz. It doesn’t help the show’s credibility that it has an obvious unsavory side, merging creepy music, real footage and unlabeled re-enactments in ways intended to confuse viewers and promote belief in the paranormal.

Yet “Sightings” somehow remains seductive, if only because the exotic claims it chronicles--from alien abductions to disembodied souls acquiring human form--cannot be entirely discounted.

Even though most seem pretty loopy.

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A couple of weeks ago, “Sightings” checked in on a “frightening entity” that was terrorizing a family somewhere in the Midwest, capturing on videotape its “hours of bizarre ghostly activity.” Look, there on the wall, a dark blotch. Was that the shadow of a frightening entity or what?

It turned out that the entity was a long-dead girl named Sally, whose presence could be detected by a “swirling frigid aura,” after which, if she really got ticked off, she would inflict deep scratches on the body of the husband in this household.

And look, it was happening right there on the screen. The camera zoomed in on the guy’s arm, which bore bloody scratch marks. “Sally, stop it,” demanded the man’s wife. Then a “Sightings” crew member said, “It’s cold in this part of the room.” Things got so scary that a psychic had to be summoned. “I feel her,” he said. “Hi, Sally. What’s goin’ on?”

It was a definite crisis. So who do ya call? Showing up at this haunted house in the following week’s episode was “Sightings” host Tim White, who not only felt a supernatural coldness but also was horrified by the “mysterious welts” forming on the forehead of one of his crew members.

Weighing in next was “ghost expert” Al Rauber, who suggested that Sally could be a form of energy, even though he wasn’t ruling her out as a ghost. In any event, White concluded, “This case merits further investigation.”

As do so many others, including the two women claiming in the same episode to have been abducted by aliens and taken aboard their spacecraft. To make things worse, one of them reported, when she was returned, her contact lenses were missing.

But enough of them and on to “Angels Rescue Schoolmates from a Madman.” If not angels, then at least “some unseen force was at work,” White deduced before moving on to the cattle mutilations linked to “many lights up in the sky.”

As for this Sunday’s episode, you may want to skip the segment on alien spacecraft (“Suddenly a series of red-orange objects . . . “) and even the psychic animal therapist who learned from a dog that its owner’s husband was sleeping with the next-door neighbor. But don’t miss “Alien Abductees Receive a Terrifying Message From Their Captors.”

That message, controversial Harvard Prof. John Mack says in the segment, could be that these “little gray” abductors are mad at us and consider Earth “a malignancy at a cosmic level.” Mack, the author of the book “Abductions,” says that “there’s no reason to believe they (the alleged abductees) are not telling the truth.”

That level of trust also permeates Saturday’s campy premiere of “The Extraordinary,” whose highlights include Telly Savalas’ terrifying account (related in an interview taped shortly before his death) of years ago encountering a dead man with an effeminate voice. Even more chilling is that, in a re-enactment, the voice sounds like Julia Child.

Where are Ghostbusters when you need them?

* “The Blue Boy” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, and at 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24. It also airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. on KOCE-TV Channel 50.

* “The X-Files” airs at 9 p.m. Fridays on Fox (Channels 11 and 6). “Sightings” airs at 6 p.m. Sundays on KTTV-TV Channel 11. “The Extraordinary” premieres at 10 p.m. Saturday on KCAL-TV Channel 9.