Spodoptera litura (S. litura) is one of the most destructive agricultural pests worldwide. There is urgent need for a nuclear polyhedrosis virus that is specific to S. litura. To date, there have been no reports regarding the responses of S. litura cells to early Spodoptera litura nucleopolyhedrovirus (SpltNPV) infection due to the lack of a reference genome and transcriptome for S. litura. In this study, a cell transcriptome from the host S. litura was assembled and used for Illumina strand-specific RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) to generate 99180 unigenes, representing the 18 hour infection cycle. More than 2000 S. litura genes were significant differentially regulated throughout the infection. The levels of viral mRNAs began to increase dramatically at 6 hpi, and this increase continued throughout the remainder of the infection. We focused on the expression of genes related to stress responses, apoptosis, metabolic enzymes and host cell innate immune system. A small subset of genes related to host stress response, especially for 62 ones being able to annotated as enzyme, ligand and receptor genes, were observed to be specifically differentially expressed at 6 hpi. At 18 hpi, 104 unigenes were continuously significantly changing from 0 hpi to 18 hpi, considered to be viral multiplication related genes, including 3 annotated SL221 unigenes and 81 viral genes, such as tetraspanin and iap gene. This information and further studies on the regulation of host gene expression by baculovirus infection at early stage will provide the tools needed to enhance the utility of this virus as an effective insecticide.