I don't get the title...

I think it's merely to indicate that Borloff's experiments are blashphemous (necromancy, essentialy) as well as the methods he uses (dead bodies stolen from graves as 'tuners') and where it leads him (madness, obsession, and I guess to destruction, but it's not made clear, he simply disappears - between scenes in the lab, and his daughter escaping and people coming to her rescue, and then cutting back to the lab with him gone, presumably into the vortex, after hearing his dead wife speak his name audibly).

So the work is 'of the devil', tho' the devil never enters directly into the story.

The name of the novel that this movie was made from was titled, "the edge of running water" if I remember right; they probably didn't want to use that title for the movie because it is too 'flowery' and wouldn't convey the idea of a horror movie. On the side-note, movies with words like 'devil' and 'hell' in the title draw more viewers. (really!). The phrase 'edge of running water' is a reference (I think) to the time-travel idea, that you can't wade through the same area of water twice, because the water has already passed by. Do a google on the phrase "edge of running water" and maybe it will turn up more....and before I forget: this movie scared the crud out of me as a youngster; the last scene of floating encased corpses...yeeeesh!!

Maybe because the actress who played the villain in this movie was a communist in real life.