A video showing a group of Australian teens hitting and "killing" a person dressed as a clown is entirely staged, the video's creator has confirmed to BuzzFeed News.
The video shows a group of boys patrolling for a "killer clown" to film, following a spate of apparent clown attacks in the US and around the world.
In the video, the boys pull into dark parking lot, where they spot a clown who then attacks one of them with a wooden bat. A car can then be seen hitting the clown, who is left in "a pool of blood" after the incident. The video was uploaded to YouTube on 13 October and has since had more than 200,000 views.
The Daily Mail reported the video as news, despite no statement from police or any evidence to back up its claims that a bunch of Australian teenagers had been "driving around for hours looking for clowns", before finding one and running him over with their car.
"I like to entertain people by making funny and relevant videos," the video's creator, who posts as Skooska Entertainment, told BuzzFeed News. "My goal for this video was to make people believe it was real and it kind of worked much better than I had originally planned."
Skooska told BuzzFeed News he made the "killer clown" video because he wanted to "experiment with fake blood".
"My younger brother had been giving me some trouble at home so I decided to dress him up as a clown and hit him with a car," he joked.
"I have some experience in [editing program] After Effects and have made many videos using them, so I used that to make the car hit look like it really happened."
Skooska says his fake-blood recipe was mainly corn syrup.
"The rest," he said, "is history."
