Time tunnels, bathing in blood and wonton soup: movies about the search for eternal youth – ranked!

10. The Wasp Woman (1959)

The ageing face of a cosmetics CEO (the tragic Susan Cabot in her final film role) is blamed for falling sales, so she injects herself with an experimental wasp enzyme and sheds 20 years in one weekend. Unfortunately, it also turns her into a homicidal wasp monster in this low-budget creature feature directed by the B-movie maestro Roger Corman.

9. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011)

Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) was the prime asset of the first film in Disney’s theme-park franchise, but the charm is wearing thin in this third sequel as he races against old adversaries, Blackbeard and Barbossa, to find the fountain of youth. The best moment, amid the frenetic cavorting, is an eerie encounter with vampire mermaids.

8. Cocoon (1985)

It’s close encounters of the geriatric kind as residents of a Florida old folks’ home take sneaky rejuvenating dips in next door’s swimming pool, unaware that the water is suffused with extraterrestrial life force. A cracking cast of Hollywood veterans, and Brian Dennehy as the alien-in-chief, keep slushiness at bay in Ron Howard’s fable, though it’s hard not to get just a little misty-eyed.

7. Dumplings (2004)

Secret ingredient … Miriam Yeung samples Bai Ling’s soup in Dumplings. Photograph: Photo 12/Alamy

Bai Ling, whose eccentric red carpet outfits have enlivened many a fashion blog over the years, acts her socks off as a chef who peddles rejuvenating jiaozi dumplings to Hong Kong’s ageing socialites. Once you know her secret ingredient, you’ll never think of wonton soup the same way again, though Christopher Doyle’s exquisite cinematography makes even the gnarlier elements in Fruit Chan’s film look like Elle Decor.

6. Death Becomes Her (1992)

Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn camp it up as longtime Hollywood frenemies competing against each other to stay young and seductive in Robert Zemeckis’s cartoonish black comedy. Isabella Rossellini steals all her scenes as the purveyor of a mysterious elixir that promises to restore their youthfulness – albeit with unexpected consequences. The film won an Oscar for best visual effects.

5. Fedora (1978)

A film star goes to unconscionable extremes to prolong her career and preserve her legacy in Billy Wilder’s penultimate film, revisiting ageing diva territory already mined by the writer-director 28 years earlier in Sunset Boulevard. William Holden plays a Hollywood producer whose attempts to lure her out of reclusive retirement on her Greek island lead to tragedy.

4. Countess Dracula (1971)

The divine Ingrid Pitt stars in Hammer’s version of the oft-filmed Elizabeth Báthory story as a depraved Hungarian aristocrat who murders virgins and bathes in their blood to preserve her youth and beauty. Can she make it to the altar to marry her lusty young lover before creeping senescence wreaks havoc on her complexion?

3. Incredible But True (2022)

Deadpan … Léa Drucker in Incredible But True. Photograph: Alamy

In suburban France, a married couple buy a house with an unprepossessing time tunnel in the basement. Anyone who crawls through it emerges three days younger. But the wife gets addicted to turning back the clock on her body and becoming a supermodel in this deadpan black comedy from Quentin Dupieux, master of mundane surrealism.

2. Monkey Business (1952)

A chimpanzee pours rejuvenating potion into the water cooler in the last (and silliest) of the great screwball comedies directed by Howard Hawks. Cary Grant plays a chemist who unwittingly drinks it and regresses 20 years, leading to juvenile high jinks, fast cars and hanging out with his boss’s secretary (Marilyn Monroe), much to the chagrin of his wife (Ginger Rogers).

1. Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

Disney at its creepiest … Jonathan Pryce is Mr Dark in Something Wicked This Way Comes. Photograph: Everett Collection/Alamy

Mr Dark’s carnival grants the wishes of residents in a small Illinois town with the help of a carousel that reverses ageing by turning backwards. But there’s a price to be paid. Studio tinkering lightened up Jack Clayton’s film of Ray Bradbury’s novel, but it’s still Disney at its creepiest – especially the astonishing scene where Dark (Jonathan Pryce) corners the young protagonist’s dad (Jason Robards) in the library and tempts him with an offer to turn back the years.