It was a good monster movie, wasn’t it? I saw it when I was 9. A few months later, our family took a vacation to California. While we were staying at a trailer park in Los Angeles, I had to walk back to the trailer late at night, and a nearby car made the ant noise with a squeaking power-steering belt or some such. Well over 50 years, and I can still remember the feeling.
About 1980 or so I was in a Costco(?) in southern California, and one of the blowers on the roof was making that sound. I looked up and said Them!
The guy next to me said 1954, James Arness, Ed Gwenn!