Provided

Cornell Cinema will hold a Halloween night screening of "The Hands of Orlac" in Sage Chapel, with live organ, theremin and piano accompaniment.

Young writers

The First-Year MFA Reading Series at Buffalo Street Books in downtown Ithaca features graduate students in the Creative Writing Program reading selections from their work on Fridays this semester.

Travis Duprey will read his poetry and Mary-Margaret Stevens reads from her fiction Oct. 25. The series also includes readings of fiction by Lanre Akinsiku and poetry by Liza Flum Nov. 1, and poetry by Renia White and fiction by Ling Ma Nov. 15. Readings begin at 6 p.m. and are free and open to the public.

Information: http://english.arts.cornell.edu/news/events/

Voting rights debate

Cornell Law School will host a debate on a recent controversial Supreme Court case involving Shelby County, Ala., and its impact on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Oct. 29 at 4 p.m. in the MacDonald Moot Court Room of Myron Taylor Hall.

Sponsored by the Federalist Society and the Black Law Students Association, the debate features Cornell law professor Michael Dorf and Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative and a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Museum in the Dark

The Museum of the Earth and Cornell’s Department of Astronomy will host Museum in the Dark, a Halloween-themed celestial celebration for families, Oct. 30 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the museum.

Activities include trick-or-treating throughout the museum, a stellar science lesson for kids; stargazing through a high-powered telescope; learning about galaxies and planets at interactive displays; and making ice cream using liquid nitrogen. Costumes encouraged. Admission is $5 per guest. Information: http://www.museumoftheearth.org

Bloody musical

The Melodramatics Theatre Company begins its 10th anniversary year with a revival of one of its most popular productions, “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” opening Halloween night in Cornell’s Risley Theatre.

Showtimes are Oct. 31, Nov. 1-2 and Nov. 7-9 at 8 p.m. Advance tickets are $10 for students, $15 general; on sale at www.melodramatics.com. $12/$17 at the door; group discounts available.

The musical thriller, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, follows fictional barber Benjamin Barker as he is driven over the edge by injustice and the loss of his family, and seeks revenge as Sweeney Todd.

The theater company is a collaborative effort featuring Cornell and Ithaca College students and community members. Ithaca College student Ben Poppleton is the show’s director; Cornell students in the cast include Alex Quilty in the title role and Christian Kelly as Anthony.

Gothic thriller

Cornell Cinema presents the silent film classic “The Hands of Orlac” at a free Halloween screening with live musical accompaniment in Sage Chapel, Oct. 31 at 8 p.m.

Billed as “a deliciously twisted thriller” and “writhing with sexual innuendo and Freudian imagery,” the 1924 film charts the mental disintegration of a concert pianist (Conrad Veidt) whose hands are amputated after a train crash and replaced with those of an executed murderer.

Highlighting German Expressionist visual and performance styles, the film is based on a book by medical-horror novelist Maurice Renard and was produced in Vienna, birthplace of psychoanalysis.

Accompanying the film are Dennis James on the Sage Chapel organ and the theremin and Frederick Hodges on piano
. The program is co-sponsored with the Department of Music and the Ithaca Motion Picture Project. Information: http://cinema.cornell.edu

Seeing ‘The Wiz’

Award-winning journalist Scott Poulson-Bryant will give a lecture, “Dorothy Sings the Blues: Sidney Lumet’s ‘The Wiz’ and the Ethnic Spectacle of Blaxploitation Cinema,” Oct. 31 at 5 p.m. in Room 124 of the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Reception to follow; free and open to the public.

A founding co-editor of the black culture magazine Vibe, Poulson-Bryant is a doctoral candidate in American studies at Harvard University. His dissertation looks at African-American popular culture and sociopolitical movements of the 1970s.

He is author of “Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America” (2006) and “The VIPs” (2011). His work has appeared in The Journal of Popular Music Studies, American Studies and Palimpsest.

His talk is presented by the Department of Performing and Media Arts’ New Directions in Media and Performance Studies Speaker Series.