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Harvard Square haunts will come alive with costume contests, themed menus, and discounts this Friday night as local businesses celebrate Halloween.

For the third year in a row, Harvest — an upscale restaurant on Brattle Street — will host a Halloween-themed dinner, boasting a five-course menu and a cocktail hour. This year’s theme is the Twilight Dine, based off of the 1960s television series The Twilight Zone.

Harvest executive chef Nicholas P. Deutmeyer, who helped design the meal, said that each course, starting with the cocktail hour, is based on an episode from the series. The menu includes a course inspired by 1950s airline meals in a reference to one famous episode, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” where a man played by William Shatner tries to stop a gremlin from destroying a plane midflight.

Next year, Deutmeyer said, he plans to collaborate with Alice Hoffman — the writer of the “Practical Magic” series — a regular at Harvest, to theme a meal around the films based on the novels.

“Halloween has always been a passion project of mine,” Deutmeyer said. So far, more than 30 of the 40 tickets to this year’s meal — each of which costs $125 — have been sold, according to Deutmeyer.

Harvard students can snag desserts and listen to eerie organ music at the Harvard Organ Society’s Halloween recital in the Memorial Church sanctuary on Friday evening. Film buffs can watch a matinee screening of Bram Stoker’s Dracula at Brattle Theatre on 35-millimeter film on Friday.

For families with children, the Collins branch of the Cambridge Public Library will host a seasonal storytime on Friday morning, and the O’Connell and Central Square branches will hold Halloween celebrations with crafts and stories in the afternoon.

And for the 21-plus crowd, there’s no shortage of late-night options in the Square. Grafton Street, a pub located near the Harvard Kennedy School campus, will host its annual “Nightmare on Grafton Street” celebration from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. The event will feature live music and a best costume contest, with a $100 gift card for the winner. The local bar Shay’s will also host a Halloween party on Friday night, and Charlie’s Kitchen will offer discounts from Oct. 30 to Nov. 2.

J.P. Licks, an ice cream and coffee shop on Massachusetts Avenue near Harvard Yard, will hand out 50 free ice cream tickets to the first 50 trick-or-treaters to stop by on Halloween night. The store will also offer seasonal ice cream flavors including caramel apple, pumpkin spice, and pumpkin cheesecake.

The gelato shop Amorino will offer a free small cup of the dessert to the first 100 children younger than 12 to visit the store between Oct. 29 and Oct. 31. Hungry trick-or-treaters can also find seasonal sweet treats at other Harvard Square businesses — including spider web cheesecake at Flour Bakery and a Cup of Dirt sundae at the ice cream chain Van Leeuwen.

Some businesses celebrated on the nights leading up to Halloween. Harvard Book Store held an “After Dark” event on Thursday, which included a book-pitching circle themed around scary stories, a costume contest, and time to browse the store’s shelves in the dark using only flashlights. Marketing manager Lily Rugo said this is the first time the bookstore has hosted a Halloween event since 2019.

Rugo said she began planning “After Dark” after realizing that the “late night crowd” attending the book store’s midnight novel release parties might bring the same enthusiasm to Halloween.

“I just kind of pitched it because I was like, ‘Oh, it’ll be easy. Why not?’” Rugo said in an interview shortly before the event. “Now it’s gotten bigger.”