There Are More Than a Dozen 'Fear Street' Books in Total
Jul. 16 2021, Published 12:17 p.m. ET
Even if you never read the Fear Street books by R.L. Stine, chances are you're totally into the Fear Street movies on Netflix. But how many books are there that serve as the source material for the series of films? To be fair the movies don't follow the books to a T, but the Fear Street novels did inspire the movies.
When most of us outgrew R.L. Stine's Goosebumps books of the '90s, we graduated to the Fear Street novels from the same author. They have always been more mature and just a tad scarier than the other R.L. Stine books, and they definitely scared kids into keeping their bedside lamps on all night. But how do they factor into the Netflix movie trilogy?
So, how many 'Fear Street' books are there?
According to Amazon, there are 17 books in the original Fear Street series. The first was published back in 1996, and more have been churned out over the years, with the series never quite dying out.
And R.L. Stine doesn't seem intent on letting go of this series any time soon. In 2020, Fear Street: The Beginning was published, and it undoubtedly breathed new life into the book series.
Which 'Fear Street' books are the movies based on?
Although there are more than a dozen Fear Street books out there, the movies on Netflix are only loosely based on some of the books that came long before the film franchise. The book Fear Street Cheerleaders: The First Evil has hints of the first Fear Street movie in it, from the possessed cheerleader Sam to the bus accident.
The Fear Street book Lights Out takes place at a camp and Trapped involves tunnels underground, not unlike those depicted in the second Fear Street movie. There's a chance that the third movie in the trilogy follows some of the details of the Fear Street book The Betrayal, which includes the story of a young witch burned at the stake.
There's a big difference between the 'Fear Street' books and other R.L. Stine novels.
You might have been a fan of the Goosebumps book and TV series as a kid. Maybe you even got heavily into the Fear Street novels at some point as you got older. But if that's the case, then you probably know all too well how different Fear Street and Goosebumps are, even if they're from the same author.
R.L. Stine knows how different Fear Street is and he seems to have no qualms about setting it apart from the much tamer Goosebumps series.
"Oh, these are much scarier," he told The Guardian, of the stories in the Fear Street book and movie series. "Nobody ever dies in Goosebumps, and a lot of people die in Fear Street. I killed off a lot of teenagers. And the films are scarier than the books."
