When you think about horror movies, the phrase "socially conscious" usually doesn't enter your mind.

Mentally, you'd have to wade through all the cliches about bloodstained blades, teenagers who should really get out of that forest/basement/sorority house and monsters awakened from a centuries-long slumber.

Yes, many horror movies are loaded with racist and sexist conventions that intelligent people will reject — see "Scream," "Scary Movie," and their sequels for a definitive list of the offending stereotypes.

But some horror films can hang with the best message movies -- even if the hanging happens to be from a meat hook.

For decades, top horror filmmakers have subverted audiences' gorefest expectations to slip in deeper messages, social commentary and progressive casting.

Because we can't read filmmakers' minds, we can't say for sure what statements — if any — they set out to make. But the appeal of good horror movies is that they not only scare us, but they also force us to think about why we're scared. What anxieties do they play on? Why are the scariest monsters in monster movies so often human?

Serious dramas, meanwhile, can sometimes feel as subtle as ax murders: emotionally bludgeoning audiences into weeping along with whatever preachy statement the filmmakers put forth for Oscar voters' consideration.

If you'd rather watch teenagers flee zombies than "inspired by true events" stories about regular people suing chemical companies, you might also enjoy our pre-Halloween list of a few horror movies with something to say.

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"The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (1974)

THE PLOT: Five youths are attacked by chainsaw-wielding Leatherface and his family of cannibals after their van breaks down. The latest of its many inferior offshoots is "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning," came out this month.

THE MESSAGE: Director and co-writer Tobe Hooper may make a vegetarian of you with his parallels between cannibalism and eating animals. One character describes how cows are killed before they're turned into steak. The family's home is littered with parts of dead animals. A human's death is accompanied by an animal's screams.

Many have noted the film's pro-vegetarian stance, including Def Jam Records' Russell Simmons, in an interview with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

"The way that woman was screaming, 'Aaaahhh,' and she's running away -- that's how every animal you eat is running for his life," said Simmons, who became a vegan years ago. "That kind of freaked me out."

SCARINESS: Extreme. Very violent and upsetting.

SUBTLETY: Many people miss the message about meat, though it couldn't be more obvious if it were on a pamphlet.

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"Godzilla" (1954) (Original Japanese title: "Gojira")

THE PLOT: American nuclear weapons testing unleashes the mighty Godzilla. The monster goes berserk on Japan until a weapon is invented that can defeat it. The weapon is deemed too dangerous to exist and so it doesn't, leaving the world free from the weapon but open for many sequels.

THE MESSAGE: Americans may have seen just a guy dressed as a lizard, but Japanese audiences had no trouble spotting the anti-atomic statement less than a decade after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

SCARINESS: Director and co-writer Ishiro Honda asks pointed questions about whether ethics can evolve as quickly as technology.

SUBTLETY: The parallels are just obvious enough. When the film suggests that the anti-Godzilla weapon is too dangerous, it's obvious what weapon they're really talking about.

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"28 Days Later" (2002)

THE PLOT: Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from a 28-day coma to find London decimated by feral "infecteds" who have contracted "rage," a rabies-like blood disease.

THE MESSAGE: Many critics have noted parallels between "rage" and viruses including Ebola and AIDS viruses. In a profile of director Danny Boyle, New York Times writer Caryn James neatly summarized the film as "'Mad Max' for the age of AIDS and SARS." The shunning of those who have "rage" or are threatened by the "infecteds" reflects the isolation felt by those with real-life infectious diseases.

SCARINESS: High. Anyone can get "rage."

SUBTLETY: The attacks by the infecteds are plenty scary, but what really haunts you is the way a tiny island is abandoned by the rest of the world.

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"Night of the Living Dead" (1968)

THE PLOT: Something awakens the recently dead and fills them with a hunger for living flesh. Survivors try to fend them off in a Western Pennsylvania farmhouse.

THE MESSAGE: Director and co-writer George Romero took the then-striking step of casting a black actor as his hero in the midst of intense racial tensions in America: it was released the year that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The film was the first of Romero's "Dead" series to address social issues.

SCARINESS: The mood is relentlessly grim and unsettling; so is Romero's take on some of the living.

SUBTLETY: Romero is in total control: you get the feeling that if the dead really did rise up and try to eat the rest of us, this is pretty much how it would happen.

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asap contributor Tim Molloy is an editor on the AP's national desk.

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