“Ave Satani” is the theme song to the 1976 film The Omen. It was composed by Jerry Goldsmith and won him an Academy Award. The Omen won an Oscar for Best Score, with Ave Satani nominated for Best Song, one of the few “foreign” language songs ever to be nominated. The language is Latin.
The title means “Hail Satan” in Latin, in opposition to “Ave Christi”. In an interview, Goldsmith says that his idea was to create a kind of Satanic version of a Gregorian chant and came up with ideas while talking with the London choir-master of the orchestra that was helping him. He decided to create something like a Black Mass, inverting Latin phrases from the Latin Mass. The choir-master, according to Goldsmith, was an expert in Latin and helped him come up with phrases – instead of saying “Hail Mary”, they decided on “Hail Satan”, and so on. So the song contains various Latin phrases inverting Christ and the Mass, such as “Ave Versus Christi”, meaning “Hail Anti-Christ”, and “Corpus Satani”, an inversion of “Corpus Christi”, the body of Christ.
A version of the song has been produced by the band Fantômas, who altered some of the lyrics so that they mean “smallest blood, body spirit” rather than “we drink the blood, we eat the flesh,” and added the word “Rotted”. Other versions of the original song have been performed by the Italian vocalist Survio Tulio, and by Gregorian. It has been used in mixes of sinister music and such a concept was made into an album by Dee Snider and other musicians, entitled Oculus Infernum Van Helsing’s Curse.
The British heavy metal band Black Sabbath have used the song as an intro for many shows and tours during their tenure with Tony Martin. The American heavy-metal band, Machine Head, previously used this as an introduction track to their live performances some of which have been recorded. The Norwegian black metal band Mayhem has also used the song as an intro to shows.
